There are gender wars, and then there are casualties. It wasn’t until 2011 that the behemoth toymaker LEGO acknowledged girls’ desire to build with bricks, even though the company had long before made a seemingly effortless pivot to co-branding, video games, and major motion pictures. So it’s little wonder that girls face all-too-real obstacles when […]
Read moreEnlarging images to provide visitors with more detail.
Problem
A computer monitor has low resolution, which can make detail difficult to see.
Solution
Allow visitors to zoom into an image using one of the following methods:
- An enlarge button. An easy method is to put a small “Enlarge” button next to an image. In current screen displays, zoomed images that fit within 750 pixels wide and 650 pixels high, are sufficient.
- Zoom into and around details. Provide a small thumbnail that the user can click on and see what they are looking at in detail. Also, let the visitor pan from within the zoomed view.
Discussion
Zooming is critical, so virtually all images on your web site should be displayed relatively small inline with the text, but have an option for a full-screen view. It is rare that visitors really need to zoom far into an image, so an enlarge button with one state of zoom will suffice in most instances.
Organizations concerned with the copyrights of their images can either watermark them with a faint tint (a watermark with curved lines, using both white and black, is virtually impossible to manually remove), or by slightly warping the zoomed image so that the high-resolution original cannot be re-assembled.