As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, we often use Drupal at Blueye for client sites. We aren’t the only ones! Universal music is using Drupal to power their new site, Nike is using Drupal for their Olympics site, and even FedEx has adopted Drupal to power their news site. That’s pretty cool! It shows just how great and powerful Drupal is.  I’m interested to see what other big name companies will adopt Drupal and what various situations they will use it for.

Yesterday, Facebook announced that it’s developer platform would become open source. Since Blueye has been gradually becoming more involved in Facebook application development, this is interesting news for us. Developing an application for Facebook no longer means the application can only sit in Facebook world. Building for one Facebook now means porting your application over to other social networks with minimal effort.

It’s definitely nice of Facebook to finally open source its super popular development platform…but it would be even nicer if they either mirrored Open Social or integrated with it in some way. Facebook has been playing in its own sandbox for some time now and its nice of them to come out and play with the rest of us. They seem to be slowly opening the shades. Come on Facebook…open is better.

How did you spend your Memorial Day weekend? Did you go out of town and spend time with the family? Did you get stuck in traffic? Were you trapped in a box? Here, at Blueye, we stand firm on thinking outside of the box. When it comes to designing and developing, we take your project out of the box, even if that means using an unconventional idea. Making sure you’re happy with the end product and having a fully functioning website is our biggest concern and that’s what makes our website design and development team a strong force in the industry.

As a client, you may send a bunch of images over to your designer only to have them tell you they can’t use them because they “aren’t high res.” What exactly does that mean? What makes an image high res?

First, lets talk about resolution. Resolution refers to the number of pixels that make up an image. Image quality is directly related to image resolution. If an image has a higher resolution, it’s going to be better quality. Images that are used on the web are typically lower res images. Since a computer screen doesn’t require as high of a resolution as a printer does, web images can be lower res. Typically web images are 72, PPI meaning pixels per inch. Print images are generally 300 PPI and increase according to the quality of the print.

So why can’t they use your screen shot or other web image for print? Well, they can, but it’s going to be very tiny or very low-quality. The physical size of an image and the quality of it are limited by the number of pixels. You can’t increase the resolution without decreasing size. Your designer can either keep the image at 72, and it will print blurry and grainy, or bump it up to 300 and leave you with something clear but small.

So if your designer asks you for a high res image, it means they want something they can use for print. They’re looking for something that’s 300 PPI. If you don’t know whether an image is high res or not, check with your designer. If it turns out your image isn’t going to work for that printed piece you wanted to use it for, they should be able to suggest an alternative.