Design at 1x—It’s a Fact

The tangible benefits of designing at 1x pixel density

Some quick context

  1. It’s counterintuitive to design at a low, non-retina screen resolution. I mean, I haven’t seen an iPhone 3GS in ages.
  2. At the time, it was easier to preview designs when mockups were 1:1 with the device you were previewing on. We were using an iPhone 5 and Nexus 5 as our test devices. Anything lower than 2x and 3x respectively, would appear blurry on the device.
  3. Resistance to change — since we were already designing at 2x, it’d be a lot of work to recreate all our designs at any other resolution (we’ve since redesigned everything at 1x).

7 reasons to design at 1x

1. No math

2. One-to-one between iOS and Android

3. Straightforward exporting

4. Same as engineering measurements

5. Device previewing still works

6. Smaller file size, better performance

7. Future proof

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Design Director at Dropbox. Advisor for startups. Rooting for the underdog.

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Kurt Varner

Design Director at Dropbox. Advisor for startups. Rooting for the underdog.