benbritten.com

I posted this to the Escape Factory website yesterday and thought I would crosspost it here as well for your perusal:

I am just playing around with making myself some groovy looking wallpapers and lockscreen backgrounds for my iPad and realized it is not as easy as just whacking up some 1024x768 image. There is the whole auto-rotating issue. In the end I decided to make a template, and I made it just a wee bit nicer so I could post it here.

Lovely isnt it?

The basic upshot is that for desktop wallpapers (the one that shows up behind your icons) your best bet is to make a 1024x1024 image and the center 768x768 is the area that will always be visible.

Here are some examples I took, to give you an idea:

It is important to note that the iPad overlays a gradient on top of your image (as well as icon shadows), so if you want to be color-perfect then you will want to take that into account.

As for the lockscreen, it is a slightly different beast since it has the overlay bars. In portrait, you have the same 768x768 'safe' area in the middle, but in landscape that is chopped down to a slightly thinner slice of image:

Thats it! have fun, make some cool wallpapers!

Cheers!
-Ben