Digital media
Digital media tests whether you can design and produce an outcome that fits a purpose and audience, using appropriate technical choices. You should be able to justify layout, file format, resolution and legal use of assets.
Core rules and concepts
- Start with purpose, audience and medium: a phone screen, an A3 poster and a video impose different constraints.
- Design principles include contrast, alignment, repetition and proximity (CARP), plus hierarchy and white space.
- Raster images are pixel-based (JPEG, PNG); vector images are maths-based (SVG) and scale without blur. Lossy compression shrinks more but discards data; lossless compression preserves quality.
- Print uses CMYK and higher resolution, often 300 ppi at final size; screens use RGB.
- Copyright applies automatically. Use licensed, public-domain or Creative Commons assets and attribute correctly.
Worked example
A school needs a web banner (1200 × 628 px) and an A3 poster for a concert. For the banner, place the vector school logo and a 1200 px-wide photo, export as JPEG at about 80% quality, and keep the file under 300 KB for fast loading. For the A3 poster, place the logo as SVG and use a 300 ppi photo at 297 × 420 mm, exporting as PDF with CMYK. Reasoning: screen and print have different colour and resolution needs; the vector logo avoids pixelation.
Traps
- Upscaling a small photo and calling it high resolution.
- Using RGB artwork for commercial print without conversion.
- Stretching images rather than scaling proportionally.
- Forgetting alt text or captions.
- Using copyrighted music or images without permission.