Icons/Avatars Section

[Megan]

I personally LOVE media sections. I have them on mostly all of my sites, (including my one-paged ones even if there are only a few avatars) mostly because I just really enjoy it and they never got old for me. I even take the time to take screen shots and manga scans as well. For me its just fun and helps me get motivated to work as hard or harder on the content! I also love to look at other people's media as well. I think it helps creativity and helps to see some cool designs ! Sometimes the colors and combinations of icons or wallpapers give me inspirations for layouts as well. I don't really use icons besides for forums or MSN, but I still love the idea of them :)

[Laura]

The only problem with vita backgrounds is that the vita compresses the images, so even if your quality is good when you save the image to the system, when you apply the bg it'll be downgraded. I find that lineless art works best for this purpose, since the vita is especially evil at messing with the lines. I've seen threads online asking sony to fix this, it just doesn't make sense to compress bg images like that.

Ooooh, I had no idea! Thanks for the info! It really doesn't make any sense for Sony to compress the images like that, unless they're storing it on their internal hard drives, which are quite small to begin with (I think). Seems kind of like it's one of those things that they hard coded in the beginning and it's too much of a bother to fix it. I hope they do though!

That's the story of the wallpapers sections, resolutions just keep changing on us. XD I suppose making the wallpapers bigger, while still proportional in ratio is a an option, then the bigger devices can use them and the smallest seem to be able to resize them well enough as long as it's from big to small. Too bad ratios keep changing too...

I usually design wallpapers in illustrator or photoshop at the highest available resolution with the largest widescreen ratio available, regardless of how many people use it at the moment and then provide several sizes for the most popular resolutions/aspect ratios. Resolutions change often, but it takes years and years for people to upgrade their current hardware. 1366x768 is the most popular monitor resolution right now because of all the smaller laptops that people own; I haven't personally used something that small in like... 8 years. XD

iOS was nice because they had one aspect ratio for the iPhone/iPad/iPod until the iPhone 5 came out. Still, two aspect ratios isn't bad. I love that they're very standardized compared to Android, which can be a nightmare to develop for. :x

I personally LOVE media sections. I have them on mostly all of my sites, (including my one-paged ones even if there are only a few avatars) mostly because I just really enjoy it and they never got old for me. I even take the time to take screen shots and manga scans as well. For me its just fun and helps me get motivated to work as hard or harder on the content!

I enjoy working on all the media stuff as well, especially the galleries. :) I find it's a nice break from writing, while still being productive on the site!