Designing Big Graphics on Small Screens

We design giant wall-sized printed exhibition graphics … on little laptop screens.

We pinch, zoom, pan, and reassure ourselves that everything will be fine once it’s printed at actual size.

Will it?

Eh, probably not. And this is not a beginner’s syndrome. Experts will fall into exactly the same traps if they only ever look at the graphics they are making on a little screen.

Zoom Illusion:
Zooming makes things bigger on a little screen, but it doesn’t make them real. It doesn’t reproduce viewing distance, peripheral vision, lighting, glare, or the way bodies move through space. A headline that feels right on a screen can be totally wrong on a wall.

False Legibility:
Type always looks sharper and higher-contrast on backlit screens than it does in the physical world. Thin rules survive. Tight spacing behaves. Until it doesn’t, when it’s the size of a wall.

Experts Too:
Some kinds of design experience can these traps worse. Seasoned graphic designers doing their first exhibition will rely on internal rules of thumb they’ve learned from books, posters, and web work. Exhibitions behave differently.

Deferred Consequences:
Scale errors compound over time, until you’re installing and it all goes south. During fabrication and installation — and even earlier, during proofing and sampling — fixes are slow, public, and costly.

Here’s the thing:

All our design software was built for small screens. But those exhibition walls aren’t going to forgive screen-sized thinking.

Next time, how can we avoid the trap of designing large graphics using small screens?

Warmly,
Jonathan

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MtM Word of the Day:
Viewing distance. The physical distance between a visitor's eye and an exhibition component at the moment it is experienced. Viewing distance influences legibility, scale, and composition. It is informed by circulation, dwell times, and accessibility requirements.