File Sizes

In the world of design and production art, you will encounter standards and rules for dimensions, or sizes, of files. Printers have rules, coders have rules, servers have rules.

This isn’t just to keep you down, man. This is to ensure that files work where they are supposed to — that we all follow a social contract and cooperate. So what do you need to know? Let’s dive in.

Certain environments depend upon their respective parameters in order to even create that environment at all. For instance, the internet is largely composed of images and text. So, those files need to possess certain qualities, and they need to function in a way that agrees with a browser.

The digital space uses images with extensions like .jpg, .gif, and .png. While each one has unique properties, they all function on screens. Coders build them into layouts with their own sorcery and dark recipes, which makes all things internet work.

Thus, when a coder states “I need a .jpg of that image,” a bad response would be to give them a .psd file and say, “It’s still a picture.” Just because you can see it doesn’t make it usable for a non-designer.

You, the hip, valued designer says, “Here is a .jpg, because I know from the Shutterstock blog that you need to satisfy specific file type requests, in order to thwart anarchy.”

Conclusion: file types matter because if they didn’t, we wouldn’t need them, and chaos would ensue. 

Dimensions

Dimension settings are another set of rules created for specific reasons. One reason to use specific dimensions is that you don’t want to rely on apps or programs to resize or crop images for you. Likely, they’ll be using some kind of compression method that wreaks all kinds of havoc, and not just on the size of your image.

Or you can use raster images that are represented at a site size. The main feature of raster images is that it works on a pixel grid. 

For instance, Facebook has been lambasted, nay skewered, for compressing uploaded images to a degree that changes colors in not-so-subtle ways. People are actually using Facebook for their families’ photo albums, and Facebook is like, “Yeah but I don’t like that red, so I’m gonna change it.”

We won’t broach that subject (how to prevent Facebook from ruining your photos, mostly because it’s guesswork.) It’s just an example of how leaving things up to AI will be the downfall of human existence and erase all our past triumphs and progress.

That brings us to an example of actually using this philosophy of cooperation in our work as designers.

Here in the Shutterstock blog office, we use rules for image dimensions. A header image in a post has to be 2880 pixels wide by 1800 pixels in height. When I’m creating or manipulating an image for a post, I set those measurements as parameters for the Crop tool in Photoshop.

This allows me to crop the photo exactly where I want, proportionally. After cropping, the image will be sized correctly, so my editor won’t berate me in front of my coworkers.

(Furthermore, the image I used above to illustrate our rule of 2800px max width is actually 1024px max width because that’s the rule for images within a blog post.)

Conclusion: following this rule allows you to retain control of your assets in their environment, instead of allowing our robot overlords to destroy us.

Most of us follow the rules, and it’s really important to take them seriously. Turning in work that is useless to other designers, printers, or websites shouldn’t happen if you keep the information you need in a place where you won’t forget it.

Make your creations accurate for reproduction — or so someone else can pick it up in your absence — and we’ll all get along.