Shifted Pixels Explains Effect Of Retina Display On Web Design
/EINPresswire.com/ Shifted Pixels, a Sydney based professional web design company explains what can be the effect of retina display on web design.
Retina Display vs. Standard Display
Retina Display is a term used by Apple to describe screens or other display devices with pixels so dense that they can't be distinguished by the eye at a normal viewing distance. Retina displays are found on the newest Apple products and will likely be found on future products from other manufacturers, so there are many implications for the web designers. The main difference between a standard display and a Retina Display is that retina displays have a DPI up to 3 times higher than standard displays, featuring 326 pixels per inch. The new IPhone 4 features 3.5 inch diagonal 960 x 640 screen. The new IPad 3 has a resolution of 2048x1536: that's 3.1 million pixels on a 9.7 inch screen. For a designer, this means several things:
• Near Print Quality Rendering: With this higher resolution standard, web site rendering nearly achieves print quality. There are a lot of reasons why a web designer should consider designing for print now, something discussed in great detail below.
• Smoother Font Rendering: Fonts are rendered much more smoothly on retina displays. In other words, a good decorative font with lots of detail will look even better on a Retina Display than on a standard screen.
• Shrunken Images Display More Detail: When a high-resolution image is shrunk to half the display size, more detail can fit in a smaller space.
• Potentially greater load times: Page load time and bandwidth once again must be taken into account due to the cumulative size of many high-resolution images.
Shifted Pixels, a Web Designer in Sydney has been creating responsive web sites that look great on both Retina Display and on standard displays. See below for more information on designing for retina display.
Why Design for Print?
Since 2011, IPad screen resolution has been 4 times higher than that of most other devices. In the past, a website designer typically doesn't consider designing with print-quality in mind, but that's exactly what this new display medium enables: detail so fine that the eye can not perceive the pixels. From the graphics end, this requires much more attention to detail than typical web design Sydney, and requires caution not to negatively impact the load time for other display types.
Design Tips for Retina Display
• One best practice is to use multiple images for the same web layout, and have different images load for different displays. Since it's predominantly IPads that use this new technology, using PHP and CSS to render different sets of images for IPad is one possible solution.
• Hassle of using multiple images can be avoided by having the browser render the images with CSS3. From simple techniques like gradients and box shadows to more advanced drawing capabilities, load time can be decreased and ensure the highest quality rendering on all devices by replacing a many of images with a few lines of CSS.
• When generating images in Photoshop, create layers of solid colours, patterns, or gradients with the vector mask tool. This allows to scale image sets to double their original size without distorting any of the images. Whenever possible, be sure to use "snap to pixel" when scaling.
• Images with multiple colours can be created in Illustrator to exact pixel size, copied, and pasted in Photoshop as a smart object.
• Photoshop Actions can quickly scale images up 200%.
• More complex images should be rendered in a vector graphics editor such as Illustrator so they can be properly scaled and exported at multiple sizes.
• The Filament Group provides an open source solution called Responsive Images that can swap image sets with javascript and a special .htaccess file, eliminating the need to use or modify the PHP template.
• Adaptive Images is a PHP-based solution that detects the end-user's screen size and displays scaled versions of a larger image accordingly. Adaptive Images is another open source project that requires GD lib and PHP5, Apache, and access to the .htaccess file.
At Shifted Pixels Website developer Sydney, designing for print-quality Retina Displays are an exciting new challenge. The web sites will still be beautiful, even on an IPad 3.
Shifted Pixels is a Sydney based professional web design company specialising in custom website design, CMS, Shopping Carts, Ecommerce and Online Marketing.
Media Contact:
Matt Vaughan
Shifted Pixels
+61 2 9993 0453
http://www.shiftedpixels.com.au
PR courtesy of Online PR Media.
Retina Display vs. Standard Display
Retina Display is a term used by Apple to describe screens or other display devices with pixels so dense that they can't be distinguished by the eye at a normal viewing distance. Retina displays are found on the newest Apple products and will likely be found on future products from other manufacturers, so there are many implications for the web designers. The main difference between a standard display and a Retina Display is that retina displays have a DPI up to 3 times higher than standard displays, featuring 326 pixels per inch. The new IPhone 4 features 3.5 inch diagonal 960 x 640 screen. The new IPad 3 has a resolution of 2048x1536: that's 3.1 million pixels on a 9.7 inch screen. For a designer, this means several things:
• Near Print Quality Rendering: With this higher resolution standard, web site rendering nearly achieves print quality. There are a lot of reasons why a web designer should consider designing for print now, something discussed in great detail below.
• Smoother Font Rendering: Fonts are rendered much more smoothly on retina displays. In other words, a good decorative font with lots of detail will look even better on a Retina Display than on a standard screen.
• Shrunken Images Display More Detail: When a high-resolution image is shrunk to half the display size, more detail can fit in a smaller space.
• Potentially greater load times: Page load time and bandwidth once again must be taken into account due to the cumulative size of many high-resolution images.
Shifted Pixels, a Web Designer in Sydney has been creating responsive web sites that look great on both Retina Display and on standard displays. See below for more information on designing for retina display.
Why Design for Print?
Since 2011, IPad screen resolution has been 4 times higher than that of most other devices. In the past, a website designer typically doesn't consider designing with print-quality in mind, but that's exactly what this new display medium enables: detail so fine that the eye can not perceive the pixels. From the graphics end, this requires much more attention to detail than typical web design Sydney, and requires caution not to negatively impact the load time for other display types.
Design Tips for Retina Display
• One best practice is to use multiple images for the same web layout, and have different images load for different displays. Since it's predominantly IPads that use this new technology, using PHP and CSS to render different sets of images for IPad is one possible solution.
• Hassle of using multiple images can be avoided by having the browser render the images with CSS3. From simple techniques like gradients and box shadows to more advanced drawing capabilities, load time can be decreased and ensure the highest quality rendering on all devices by replacing a many of images with a few lines of CSS.
• When generating images in Photoshop, create layers of solid colours, patterns, or gradients with the vector mask tool. This allows to scale image sets to double their original size without distorting any of the images. Whenever possible, be sure to use "snap to pixel" when scaling.
• Images with multiple colours can be created in Illustrator to exact pixel size, copied, and pasted in Photoshop as a smart object.
• Photoshop Actions can quickly scale images up 200%.
• More complex images should be rendered in a vector graphics editor such as Illustrator so they can be properly scaled and exported at multiple sizes.
• The Filament Group provides an open source solution called Responsive Images that can swap image sets with javascript and a special .htaccess file, eliminating the need to use or modify the PHP template.
• Adaptive Images is a PHP-based solution that detects the end-user's screen size and displays scaled versions of a larger image accordingly. Adaptive Images is another open source project that requires GD lib and PHP5, Apache, and access to the .htaccess file.
At Shifted Pixels Website developer Sydney, designing for print-quality Retina Displays are an exciting new challenge. The web sites will still be beautiful, even on an IPad 3.
Shifted Pixels is a Sydney based professional web design company specialising in custom website design, CMS, Shopping Carts, Ecommerce and Online Marketing.
Media Contact:
Matt Vaughan
Shifted Pixels
+61 2 9993 0453
http://www.shiftedpixels.com.au
PR courtesy of Online PR Media.
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