Five tips for creating graphics for smartphones

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Mobiles are fast becoming the platforms of choice for all we do in life – browsing, chatting, other social interactions, and even starting to be used for learning delivery as well. At Upside Learning, experts have been creating various learning applications for mobile devices, including apps for iPhone, BlackBerry and Android; browser-based courses; short movies/animations etc. While working on these, they have identified that creating graphics for mobile devices is quite a challenge, especially if you are new to it.
In this brief note, we shall share five tips, which will make the creation of graphics for mobile devices less painful.
  1. Screen and size and resolution
Each mobile device has a different size and resolution (even different models from same manufacturer, except iPhone). You can’t simply design for one size and resolution, but need to actually create multiple graphics.
  1. Flexible design
Except for BlackBerry, most other smartphones have G-sensor, which understands the orientation of the phone and displays information accordingly, in landscape or portrait depending upon how the handset is held. Background images used in application can be tiled or stretched. In case of BlackBerry apps, separate images need to be created for each model to fit the screen.
  1. Colours
Among the smartphones, HTC and BlackBerry support 65,000 colours, while iPhone and Nokia support 16 million colours. Naturally, 16 million colours show better graphics with brighter, sharper and clearer images. But if you are on Windows PC, while creating graphics for iPhone, you need to set ‘Proof Setup’ under ‘View’ menu to ‘Macintosh RBG’; this will help correct colours. This will create a soft proof of colours to simulate standard Mac OS colour palette; hence it will help choose colours and contrast.
  1. Image formats
.png should be your preferred format (as against .gif), as it has greater colour depth and is fully lossless with variable transparency. While .gif format has either opaque or fully transparent pixels, .png has up to 254 levels of partial transparent pixels allowing you to take advantage of alpha transparency.
  1. Animations
Since most smartphones don’t support Flash (at this moment), animations can be done by calling images in a sequence through programming. You can also create animations in Flash and convert that to video formats that the smartphones support.

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