Homer Gaines

I was taking some pictures this weekend with a friend who a very talented web designer with a traditional background in print design. She and I have had several conversations about print designers moving into the web world and how it seems that usability is often not a concern. This mainly is because print designers don’t have the same usability concerns that web designers have.

As we talked shop while taking pictures we noticed how different we framed the subject in the shots. I shoot landscape because I’m thinking about using images for the web, whereas she shoots portrait because her first thought is about print. The next thought through my head was not how we chose to see subjects through the viewfinder but more along the lines of how we have been trained to see the world as it relates to the mediums we create for.

I was then doing some reading online and came across a post on feedly about designing for apples new Retina displays. I knew that the new iphone had a higher resolution display than any other handheld device on the market but what I didn’t pay attention to was how that could effect my designs now and in the future.

One of the take aways from the articles was changing the way I think about resolution and displays. As a designer, I look at images and measure them according to pixels but at the dawn of this new resolution world, I need to see images as points. The reason being, displays like the Retina display have a higher pixel density than other displays and instead of measuring in pixels (px) it uses points (pt).

So now,  I’m looking more into the subject to determine if how much it’s going to impact what I do as designer and may possibly begin designing my sites using this new measurement in conjunction with SVG images based on my findings.