An Experiment

[John F Dye]

I am submitting that attached file as an experiment. The original illustration was 41"x 29.5". I exported it at 20dpi to get it below 1000 pixels wide with a 80% quality level. If anyone has trouble reading the text let me know [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]
By the way I used XaraX to do the basic layout, but the illustration were scanned from old tech manuals. Most of the work was in cleaning up the scanned images, and most of that was done using Photo Brush. The illustrations were then imported given a stain glass transparence and placed on top of the rectangles that were given an cream to white linear fill so they would look old.
Any way, depending on feedback I thought I might try different dpi and quality levels to come up with an approach that would give a readable result.
John D

[John F Dye]

I am submitting that attached file as an experiment. The original illustration was 41"x 29.5". I exported it at 20dpi to get it below 1000 pixels wide with a 80% quality level. If anyone has trouble reading the text let me know [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]
By the way I used XaraX to do the basic layout, but the illustration were scanned from old tech manuals. Most of the work was in cleaning up the scanned images, and most of that was done using Photo Brush. The illustrations were then imported given a stain glass transparence and placed on top of the rectangles that were given an cream to white linear fill so they would look old.
Any way, depending on feedback I thought I might try different dpi and quality levels to come up with an approach that would give a readable result.
John D

[Ross Macintosh]

With my 19" monior set at 1280x1024 I can read the "Prior to World..." box and "The three man crew..." caption. The rest of it is just too small. I suspect that for some of what I was able to read I was just recognizing the pattern of words rather than seeing them clearly.

It seems clear to me that this is not an effective way to present work that was designed/formatted to be poster or interpretive panel size. If you desire to present the content effectively on the internet I really think you'll have to rework it specifically for that purpose.

The image you posted does give a clear idea of the appearance of the larger image you designed - just doesn't communicate the information it contains effectively. It's sort of like having a mockup layout presented, useful to see how it is organized.

Regards, Ross

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[John F Dye]

Thanks Ross,
I could not agree with you more. I did not really expect to be able to have this be clear at this size, but was curious to see what the limits were, as I do not have much experience with this sort of thing. The panels were design to be large and the illustrations and shear amount of information on each, was scaled so they would be readable at the 41"x 29.5" size. The look is intended to fit in with the '40s era "tech" of the ship. I have no interest at this point of puting them out on the web page. Although pieces of them may end up on the Cove's web site at some point in the future.
Thanks again for the feed back.
John D

[Delta Moon]

I actually can read the words, but it does make my eyes hurt and cross some. (17" old monitor)However, if I were to come across this on a website, I would double click on the text to see if the text would come in on a bigger page and more readable. Actally, I would double click on all the panels to see if I could get a better look. They layout seems lend itself well to a click-through inference without actually saying it.

All in all, your process appears to be very good and your design clean and interesting.

Delta

[John F Dye]

Thanks Delta,
I like you idea for handling web pages and will try to incoporate them when we update the web site.
I submitted this really to try to get a handle on readability and be able to compare the image on the forum with the one on my computer. The answer is they look pretty much the same. I opologize to anyone I inconvenenced. I all comes from reading Gary's artcule on bitmaps. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]
John D