True North just released the new Winnipeg Jets logo late Friday afternoon upon learning it had leaked on the Internet via this picture showing the new Jets logo on merchandise. All that is available within 24 hours of that release are in small files of the logos so there isn’t a lot for me to work with to create wallpapers. However, for the early adaptors and fervent fans, of which I know there are many in Winnipeg, here are 10 designs below in 11 different sizes.
The iPad has a 1024 x 768 pixel screen, and so does the iPad2.
However, it can be used horizontally as well as vertically. So what happens to your wallpaper when you turn the iPad’s orientation since it reverses the vertical and horizontal dimensions? That is, it goes from 1024 pixels wide to 768 pixels wide, and 768 pixels high to 1024 pixels high.
When you turn iPad from the horizontal to vertical orientation, or vice-versa, it automatically rotates its wallpaper to match. But that’s all it does, in rotating your wallpaper. It does not resize it to fit the new dimension. Good thing, too, cause pictures of you and your friends would be rather ugly in one orientation or another… even if skinny ugly and not just fat ugly. See Figures 1 and 2 below that shows no resizing in iPad wallpapers with rotation of orientation (please click to enlarge).
What that means is you need a square wallpaper that is 1024 pixels in each dimension. What it also means is that some parts of your wallpaper will never be seen, and some parts will only be seen. See Figure 3 for visual of descriptions below.
Well, it’d be a real pain to have to measure out everything all the time. The easiest sure way I can think of is to take the image in Figure 3 to place over your image and make it half see-through (or 50% opacity), so see if anything important in your image is in the covered area.
That’s still a pain, though, I know. “Eyeballing” the “covered patches” in Figure 3 is the only quick way of doing things. It’s not perfect, but it could be effective. You’re basically looking at cutting out 1/8 of your picture from each side (for the covered areas).
The easiest, but not necessarily fail safe, way to do it is to find your favourite 1280 x 1024 wallpapers and crop out a square the height of the full picture. Hold down the Shift key when you crop usually gives you a square. Then stretch it to the full height of the picture. Then move your square around so the 1/8 strips around the edges don’t seem to take up any important parts of your picture. Then crop and there you have it! The nicest thing about this method is that the 1280 x 1024 monitors are very popular and there are tens, of not hundreds, of millions of wallpapers already existing for them from which you can turn into iPad wallpapers.
I “eyeballed” things to create the wallpaper in Figure 4 (which is an image from the movie Avatar), and did OK.
In case you liked my “eyeballing sample” in Figure 4, I’ve included the real wallpaper for your use in Figure 5.
If you use it, Figure 6 shows how it will appear on your iPad in the horizontal orientation.
Figure 7 shows how it will appear on your iPad in the vertical orientation.
If you have any experience with Photoshop Actions (and have Photoshop at your disposal), you can always record an Action where you place the guides down. I find zooming to 400% helps accurately placing guides at 128 pixels in (and at 896 pixels from the far edge of 1024). Then you create another Action to remove those guides using the Clear Guides command under the View menu (in CS3). I have these set up so after I’ve cropped an image, I click on an Action to see the guides showing my cut-offs. If I am satisfied, I click on the next Action to clear them and Save. If not, I just Undo a few steps and crop again and test it again.
Please click here to see the iPad wallpapers I have created
(using Photoshop actions to verify their suitability).
Flesch-Kincaid grade reading level: 7.4
From my wallpapers for the University of Northern Iowa Panthers, I’ve created some backgrounds for various iPhone, Blackberry, Palm Pre and HTC models. I didn’t see anything online that looked nearly as nice as some of these… and there’s no advertising of mine on it to annoy!
These backgrounds are listed by resolution size (horizontal dimension listed first). Please identify the right one for your needs.
Now, it’s a natural and easy step to create portable hand held and phone backgrounds from wallpapers. But that doesn’t justify me making them. I mean, is there even coverage in Northern Iowa to have cells???
JUST KIDDING!!!
Enjoy, UNI-Panther supporters! You can also use some of these for Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal and other social media avatars, too!
p.s. If some of these graphics look a bit pixelated, it is because your browser setting is viewing them larger than their actual size. They are all crisp and sharp!
