General AnswerSpace Design

Owned by Ray Pearce (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Dec 03, 2014
2 min read

Resolution Of Design

When creating your psd file or eps file, aim to fit your design into a resolution of 600w x 720 h. This ensures the images are crisp for a small screen such as iPhone 3gs and a large screen such as a iPad.

Page Size

This is a matter of opinion but something after years of working with Telco’s, can safely say what is a good size for pages and what isn’t. Keep your pages under 150kb Total. Going over this eats into data caps, slows the answerSpace down and results in an all-round poor experience for the end users. An ideal page weight would be anywhere from 80 – 120kb’s. This doesn’t sound like a lot but when you are using a mobile device on an average network with no Wi-Fi access, load times will increase.

Know Your Colours

Mobile devices are used inside and outside. When designing your answerSpace keep in mind that if you were looking at the phone with the sun glaring and reflecting off the screen, whether your colour scheme will still shine through.

Size

Your index finger will comfortably select an icon 65pixels w x h (at 72 dpi), any less and it is possible the end user will be hitting the wrong category

Devices

When designing, design for an iPhone3g, the iPhone 4’s and androids have a much higher resolution as well as screen space to play with.

Content

If you are using icons that have not been designed in-house, ensure the icons have a creative commons license on them to ensure there is no copyright infringement.

The BlackBerry Factor

Blackberrys have a different form factor. The design you use for touchscreen portrait devices will not always look that flash on a blackberry device which has a default form factor in landscape mode. Here you need to think what would look good on this device, if using icons you may want to set an override to swap from a 3 column layout to a 4 column layout.

Animations

Animations can really jazz up a site, keep in mind that animations can really blow out a page size (kb’s) and cause latency within the answerSpace because of this.

CSS

Try and do as much as you can with CSS over images. CSS will load the page faster than what images would and is more controllable than images