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.
In the screenshot of the Photoshop guide above, I made the important areas different colors so that it would be easy to see where the borders of the areas are, and I put guides in so that tools such as Marquee will snap to the correct position when using it. I also made the top and bottom banners a separate layer so that you can switch them on and off easily.
I hope that this helps many of you crop and size your iPhone images properly.
Click here to download the iPhone Wallpaper Template for Photoshop.
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zakurih
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brandonlee
