Slicing (interface design)

In fields employing interface design skills, slicing is the process of dividing a single 2D user interface composition layout (comp) into multiple image files (digital assets) of the graphical user interface (GUI) for one or more electronic pages. It is typically part of the client side development process of creating a web page and/or web site, but is also used in the user interface design process of software development and game development. The process involves partitioning a comp in either a single layer [image file format] or the multi-layer native of the graphic art software used for partitioning. Once partitioned, one would save them as separate image files, typically in GIF, JPEG or PNG format in either a batch process or one at a time. Multi-layered image files may include multiple versions or states of the same image, often used for animations or widgets. Slicing is used in many cases where a graphic design layout must be implemented as interactive media content. Therefore, this is a very important skill set typically possessed by "front end" developers; that is interactive media developers who specialize in user interface development. Slices may be produced and used in several different ways. Before tableless web design, sliced images were held together precisely with html tables. Modern interactive page layout includes extensive use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and semantic markup. Tables may be used for compatibility with rarer older web browsers that are incapable of processing modern tableless coding accurately. Slicing is exclusively used for bitmap images. Vector images are usually processed by media-playing plugin applications and contained within native multimedia file formats such as X3D, SWF, SVG or PDF files. Slicing reduces work loads and computer data storage space requirements to needing only the part of a dynamic image that changes instead of the whole image. If the slice is on a transparent multi-layered image, it can be reused in multiple parts of an image without changing the background.