Think 100%

As you know, all bitmaps are created from a series of dots that comprise the picture. The density of the dots, known as “resolution”, determines how sharply the image is represented. This is often expressed in pixels per inch (ppi — in the printing field it’s known as dpi,  dots per inch). The screen resolution of computer screens, LCDs, and Plasma flat-screen displays are all 72 dots per inch (dpi) at 100%.

Bitmaps display well only at the resolution in which they were created or captured. Zooming in and out is great, but with bitmap images this will degrade the image quality. All bitmaps created for display (note: this does not include bitmaps used in FLASH files) must be created at 72dpi. Any other resolution will give you less than satisfactory results.

Loading images with a higher dpi will not result in higher quality images. Images created for print at 300di are too large, take forever to load, then display only a portion of the picture.

In general, keep your file sizes as small as possible. The amount of time, and consequently the computer power it takes to load an image, may affect the performance of other zones on your display, such as the ticker.

Do the Math

In addition to creating content at 100%, designers are often asked to develop content for specialized digital signage use. The most common consideration for developing content is whether the screen will displaying full-screen, or divided into frame layouts?

If you are creating art for a screen that includes running a data ticker at the bottom, and a side-bar to the right or left, your final art size will be affected.

Let’s say your total screen pixel size is 1280x768 at 72dpi. You have a ticker that is 60x768, plus a side-bar that is 150x708. The content area left to work with, at 100%, is 1130 pixels wide by 708 pixels tall.

A straight forward way of starting your bitmap image would be creating a new document with the correct pixel dimensions of your screen, in the proper resolution. In our example below, the widescreen pixel width is 1280, the height is 768 and the standard resolution is 72. Note also that the color mode is RGB. All color screens render with Red, Green and Blue.

Simple addition and subtraction will multiply the final successful creation of still-frame bitmap images.