[haiku] Re: Wallpaper design contest

  • From: "Charlie Clark" <charlie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2011 21:36:49 +0200

Am 12.07.2011, 21:14 Uhr, schrieb Patrik Gissberg <patrik@xxxxxxxxxxx>:

It's all about tradeoffs. Offering two or more wallpapers for
different aspect ratios may look better, but doubles the size and
decreases user-friendliness. Offering one wallpaper won't look perfect
(but good), but decreases size and increases user-friendliness.
User-friendliness is what I value the most.

This really is becoming fairly intensive navel-gazing or "bike-shedding" as it's also known. As someone who usually covers the desktop with application windows I don't care that much about the background image and I'm not sure anyone else who does a lot of work on their machine does either. Be that as it may - one size simply doesn't fit all and there are some wonderful bitmaps that would be silly (extremely complicated) as vectors and vice-versa. A display manager should be able to cope with either (webp is my preferred bitmap format 'cos it shits all over JPEG for quality versus compression but that is also by-the-by). The competition should accept either. Any designer worth their salt should be aware of the various aspect ratios; but if 4:3, 16:10 and 16:9 is all you're worried about then consider yourself lucky as the mobiles are driving more than a few cart and horses through them, any my mobile is the only time I pay attention to a desktop. 4:3 is the most permissive and allows for cropping - and film-makers for years have, with some notable exceptions, lived with its restrictions; though if someone did submit an image and explicitly prohibit cropping then letter-boxing it would be acceptable and easily implemented. Something like the cover art of Pearl Jam's "Yield" make good use of this and to be honest given the fact that the desktop is more often submerged than not, there is a lot going for this approach.

In summary: keep it simple and let battle commence!

Idiomatically yours,

Charlie
--
Charlie Clark
Helmholtzstr. 20
Düsseldorf
D- 40215
Tel: +49-211-938-5360
GSM: +49-178-782-6226

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