Throughout these posts I will be exploring a project in which I will be designing advertisement leaflets for both an iPad and a printed booklet. When designing a product that is going both on a digital screen and on a physical printed product, there are things that need to be considered and changed between the two.
Screen Size
As with paper sizes, products for digital print differ in size depending on the device, but in this case, it's resolution. Print resolution is 300ppi, but the digital resolutions are listed below.
- IPhones range from 234ppi to 806ppi and improves still
- IPad 130ppi
- Retina iPad 264ppi
- Web 72ppi
Text Adaption
As screen size can sometimes be smaller than print, the size of text can be lost on the screen. It is suggested that text on screen is two times the size in print, to allow readability and clarity. For exactly those reasons, a lot of fonts used in digital print use sans-serif fonts compared to the much more formal serif fonts used in the sister print articles. However, digital articles also allow more space to be more creative with typography and titles.
Colour
As with screen size, colour profiles differ between print and screen. For print, the profile is CMYK. This is subtractive which means the light is subtracted from paper by adding more ink.
For screens, the colour profile is RGB, which is additive- the more colour added, the brighter the screen. It is important to choose the right colour profile when designing.
Wired Magazine
As shown in this wired magazine article, shown both in print and on an iPad app, the layout and other elements of the article differ between the two. For a start, as the app involves a scroll down option which allows a lot more room for information, allowing more room for images, as seen by the differences in size above. The text also adapts sans-serif in the app, and the title is more clearly seen through a larger and simpler font. The app's scrolling feature also allows more room for larger, more readable text, compared to the magazines compressed paragraphs.
While the content of both articles are the same, many features should be changed and adapted to make the most of the screen or printed magazine.
