Appreciating Wallpaper
There are certain necessities in life that most of us take for granted. For example: toilet paper. I intended to rattle off multiple examples, but I think the TP reference qualifies as “nuff said.” We grow accustomed to certain everyday items, and eventually just forget how much we appreciate them. The same goes for items we rarely use, or, shall we say, download.
* Charmin Bears: the perfect example of paper appreciators
Since my specific position is helping maintain the Philadelphia 76er’s site, I know first hand how keeping things up-to-date is a daily and time consuming task. When it’s off-season, the website gets slightly neglected (thankfully it isn’t very needy), but now that the season is in full swing there’s a little more of a demand for attention. How do we keep fans interested? Downloadable wallpapers of course! That’s being a little dramatic, since the free wallpapers are only one of many options for the average 76er’s web-fanatic, but it was only until recently that I learned just how much work goes into those overlooked, taken for granted files.
My most recent project was to create wallpapers for the 76er’s dancers. Luckily, there’s 14 of them. Your basic third grade math skills spring into action, and voila – you assume this means fourteen different wallpapers. Fourteen? That’s NBD. However, there are multiple sizes to suit the plethora of screens that exist, which must be individually created and re-formatted accordingly: 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×900, and 1920×1200. So, that ends up totaling up to 70 different files. It isn’t over yet. Love them or hate them, iPad owners are out there, and they probably have an iPhone to match it. So that adds another 28 unique files to the batch. So that’s a grand total of 98 different files – and oh yea, I forgot about the “team shot,” adding another 7 files to the total, equaling (drum role please) 105 glorious files (4 of which might end up being downloaded).
It takes a lot to keep a fan interested, and it takes even more to keep a website relevant. So appreciate your wallpapers, and your other papers too (side note, here’s an interesting article from Temple News showing just how much TU student’s value their TP).
