Um... why? No seriously, the iPad is neat and all, but when did it become some sort of defacto standard?Originally Posted by Mike Anderson
Um... why? No seriously, the iPad is neat and all, but when did it become some sort of defacto standard?
The great thing about standards is that there's so many to choose from.
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
--A=B by Petkovšek et. al.
The fact that it is an iPad doesn't make it a de facto standard. But if one's target audience is using an iPad--that's what makes it a de facto standard.
Rick "whose new work laptop has (yech) a 1280x800 LED screen" Denney
Guess I missed the part where he mentioned iPad users being his target audience...
Well if you went with a Flash gallery, something like LiveBooks or Dripbooks, the images would scale to fit the viewer's screen. That's the slickest way to do it. Upload 1600-pixel tall images (large for the web) and they'll scale to fit everything from the phone to the tablet to the large monitor automagically on the fly.
The nice things about those sites is their image management -- you can sort pictures, make new galleries, all kinds of nice things that are hard to do with your home-made static sites. And they even create cell phone, iPad, and html search-friend versions automagically too.
Starting out as a serious photographer, that's what I would do, bypassing the custom designed soon-to-be-hopelessly-out-of-date website that most of you guys usually do ;-p
Really, doing a website from scratch is kind of dumb these days. LiveBooks/DripBook isn't free but for $30-40 a month you get a lot of value, one or two sales usually covers it for the year.
I don't know if I care if phone users can see my image perfectly. A good composition has something to say at any size, true, but something is lost on those little screens.
Actually, thank heaven for the iPad and the new iPhone (which has an "HD" screen)—they're making it standard to surf the web with a *real* screen size, even portably.
I was just curious about using the iPad as a standard because, well, it's nice but no where near as ubiquitous as the iPhone... I'm will to bet the iPhone 4G has outsold it by now.
Well there can be many standards depend upon the requirements and media for which you are going to target.
It also most of the time depends upon the your target customer or user what media they are going to use.
LiveBooks is also good source to fit images to user screen and specifications.
Well you have to pick a size and iPad dimensions will work well on 90% of computer screens. On a super large screens images of iPad dimensions will be too small. On a phone they'll be scaled down and look OK. On most laptops they'll be very usable size.
And the iPad is such a good screen to look at photos on (although it collects finger smudges like a magnet) that's why I'd optimize towards that.
I haven't thought this out completely (and haven't put it into practice) but I'm leaning towards formating all web stuff (especially photos) around the iPad screen size.
...Mike
Sorry to be a bit snarky Frank, in practice I agree with you. I have my own website, but I let the down-n-dirty listing and selling happen at etsy.com . . . and since their thumnails are always resized to 430px wide, I always size my artwork—portrait or landscape—at 860px wide, so when the user clicks on the thumbnail they'll get exactly twice* as much detail.
So, yes, I don't bother worrying about how my artwork will look anywhere except how it will look on etsy.com; THEY take care of iPads, smartphones, different web browsers, etc...
*technically four times, as it's twice as big in two dimensions
Get the Gimp! It is free for download for many operating systems. http://www.gimp.org/
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks