Design has changed a lot in the last 9 years to the point where I don’t know if a lot of this still applies.
I’ll also highlight the concept of designing for the medium; it might make more sense to create a design that does seamlessly scale without manual involvement than to do the designer’s first idea and then manually tweak that to work in every possible variation.
Given that much of the time svg is perfectly reasonable, I wish platforms had better support - I’ve found Xamarin.Forms, UWP, WPF, and native iOS all wanting. Web seems to be about the only place it works seamlessly nowadays.
Also, if anyone in the Windows desktop team is here, please support SVG desktop backgrounds. Often my desktop is vector art and I’d like to skip the jpg middle man and get something that scales to all my monitors well by default. You were somehow weirdly on the right track with the Windows 8 start backgrounds fwiw.
“Design has changed a lot in the last 9 years to the point where I don’t know if a lot of this still applies.”
I think it still applies. In my experience, as we’ve gone far away from skeuomorphic design (hey, it’s 2011 in the title, we can use that word), having those nice razor sharp minimalistic icons at 20pt/dp or smaller sizes means you do want to draw them with care. You can notice the slop when something doesn’t fall on a nice integer position.
Especially as we still are not in a fully HiDPI world. I came across this the other day when I was trying to create an icon for a 5×5 matrix. Looked great on my MacBook Pro screen. And then I dragged it to my external display that I keep for testing. And oh. Yikes. I needed to tighten things up.
All images, included png and jpeg ones, are first internally (re)converted to jpeg when assigned to the Windows background. The default conversion quality factor is 80 (for no good reason). You can change it to 100 in the registry: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\JPEGImportQuality
JPEG? Please tell me you're not forced to use lossy raster graphics for vector art? A PNG render of at least the resolution of your largest screen should be fine.
I’ll also highlight the concept of designing for the medium; it might make more sense to create a design that does seamlessly scale without manual involvement than to do the designer’s first idea and then manually tweak that to work in every possible variation.
Given that much of the time svg is perfectly reasonable, I wish platforms had better support - I’ve found Xamarin.Forms, UWP, WPF, and native iOS all wanting. Web seems to be about the only place it works seamlessly nowadays.
Also, if anyone in the Windows desktop team is here, please support SVG desktop backgrounds. Often my desktop is vector art and I’d like to skip the jpg middle man and get something that scales to all my monitors well by default. You were somehow weirdly on the right track with the Windows 8 start backgrounds fwiw.