README.md 4.9 KB

Theming

Background picture requirements

A reference to why it was very difficult to actually find good background pictures – there are quite some requirements when it comes to picking:

  • It needs to be an exceptionally good photo of course – since when chosen, people will see it every day.
  • We need to have a good balance of different motives, e.g. not too many landscape pics.
  • Same for a good balance of different colors.
  • The photo needs to work as a background. Photos with objects focused in the middle don’t really work as they will be overlapped by the widgets and content anyway.
  • Especially the top part cannot have too much differing contrast, as then it’s not possible to see the navigation icons.
  • Especially the top part should be either dark-ish or light-ish, but not a shade exactly inbetween because then contrast can neither be achieved with light nor dark icons.
  • We serve the pictures at 4k resolution and most of the selected images are also available in 6k or higher so it is future-proof.
  • For the search of course we had to limit to CC0, CC By and CC By-Sa. Only CC0 would have been practically impossible cause there’s just not so many good ones which fit.
  • Good pages to find photos are StockSnap, Wikimedia Commons, Openverse and Flickr (with license "commercial use & mods allowed"), sorting by interesting or downloads. Most others like Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay, etc. meanwhile have a non-standard license.

Background picture technicals

  • All backgrounds are sized to maximum 3840px width (4K resolution).
  • To ensure quick loading times, the image needs to be compressed, ideally to around 1 MB or less. E.g. via 90–95% quality in GIMP export. We could also explore using newer formats.
  • Previews are sized to 352px width (min height 192px), which is double of the current picker grid size so it looks nice on high-res displays. Quality is also set to around 90% at export.

Background picture credits

In img/background/: