Challenges in designing for TV Platform

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 07:46:51 GMT

Watching the Television is the favorite pastime for most of us. We can easily loose the track of time and at time the place also. Its really an engrossing medium. We are so used to of watching television and that's why we easily overlook the graphics of television. In fact some of the designers who design websites would be amazed to know how different TV designing is from web designing. Creating graphics for television is a far tough job than website graphics.

Watching TV from a distance of 6-7 feet hides the depth of screen design from the viewers. While websites on your computer screen are viewed from a distance of 1 or 2 feet maximum. Watching from such a small distance makes even a single minor mistake noticeable. In fact, the interlacing on a television display makes it hard to view at close range. This means that controls and text must be over sized so they can be read from a distance.

Low color reproduction fidelity also is a subject of concern. This means that the colors look different on the television screen than they do on a computer screen on top of this they are not even displayed with a consistency. Some colors, especially those with a lot of red, tend to bleed, spilling into neighboring pixels and thus provide a blur looking pictures. This makes those colors bad choices for fine detail or text. Blues are the most stable colors and make good backgrounds. No wonder we see a lot of designs for the Television in all shades of blue.

Text is the most difficult part of the designs to handle while designing for TV. Interlacing flicker makes it real hard to read the text especially smaller text. The minimum size in my opinion for the text that can be used is 20 pixels if you are using simpler fonts. Arial is my favorite for all TV designs. Also it makes a big difference if you are rendering it as plain text or as image. But the small TV screen (640 x 495 px) restricts the amount of text (an graphics) you can show on the TV screen. It can display only 40 or 50 characters per line line when rendering as images Text rendering will increase it to approx. 60-70 characters. Websites have no bounds, no matter what color, what font you use. The limitation of screen space, limited display elements etc restrict the graphics use. Using the stylish, cool font types for websites makes them more attractive while TV graphics lack in the use of font styles.

Working and updating website is a task of few minutes but TV graphic frequent updates is a hectic procedure and quite difficult. No one prefers to update TV graphics that often how often you do it with websites. At the end would like to conclude that both designing are good at their place but web designing has a whole galaxy of options.

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Challenges in designing for TV Platform