Anatomy of an iPhone Wallpaper

A few days ago I started working on some classic videogame iPhone wallpapers which have gotten thousands of views after I posted them and were mentioned on the AppSlappy podcast. I wanted to write a bit about how I put them together.

The iPhone’s screen is 320×480 and has two tall banners on its home screen, one on the top and one on the bottom. What annoys me about slapped-together wallpapers is how they just resize images to fit the screen and don’t take the banners into account. If images are blindly resized, the result is cutting off heads or logos that look amateurish.

In these examples, the images are resized in such a way that Master Chief’s head is obscured by the top banner, as is the Ferrari logo. I’m betting these were desktop wallpapers that were resized without thought to what would be obscured.

When the iPhone was first released, one of the first things I did was put together an iPhone wallpaper Photoshop template so that people would have a guide to what their wallpapers would look like when set.

  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • del.icio.us
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Tumblr
  • NewsVine
  • Technorati
  • Reddit
  • email
  • Print
  • Google Buzz

Tags: , , , , ,

Category: How-Tos

About the Author: Michael Gaines started being a geek at a very young age. Starting with tape recorders and TI calculators, he was armed with the tools to be creative with electronics long before most people knew what a modem was. His parents were teachers which gave him the the rare super power of teaching people how to understand the devices they're using. In college, he was a DJ at the school's radio station, and tech editor of the college newspaper. His fondness for spreading his knowledge throughout the universe has spread to the internet where he works on two podcasts: Geekistry, World Of Warcast. Until humans can reach past Earth, he currently resides in New Jersey, writing and podcasting about the many things that help teach how things work.

Leave a Reply




If you want a picture to show with your comment, go get a Gravatar.

Blog WebMastered by All in One Webmaster.