Hey, I didn’t know what to search for so I bet this has been asked, sorry.
I’m working on a few new projects for the portfolio and I do not know if I want to format them how I have everything I’ve already, or do it only for web. This is at the risk of sounding lazy of course, I just want to stay with the times. My print formating is 11"x17", I know how to do that. What I need to know is what are good format specs for digital? W x H? I’d guess 72 or 96 ppi. Anything else anybody would like to tip me off to would be awesome.
I’ve been considering the same for my portfolio, and came to the conclusion that a page format that would allow me both digital and physical with a minimum of extra work would be best. Does your print formatting look good on a desktop monitor, a laptop screen, a tablet, a phone? I’d start from there, especially from the smallest device you expect to be commonly used.
Also, 72 / 96 ppi are old concepts that hardly have any real world application anymore - almost all screens are different. The old macbook I’m writing this on has something like ~133 ppi, a retina macbook would have 220+ ppi … Either way, the size of an image in a browser depends on its resolution, not its ppi. A pixel is a pixel is a pixel. (Except for retina displays, that now scale up images that aren’t specified as high resolution, resulting in blurred images.)
If you’re building it for web, the easiest way is to size everything as a percentage of screen width. When exporting the actual image you upload, you’ll want to export to the percentage of your largest screen size.
Eg: Image width is 50% of screen width, upper limit for width of most screens is 1920px (High Screen Resolution Statistics), uploaded image should be 1920*0.5=960px minimum.