We live in a world that has become extremely accustomed to the use of graphical elements in presentations of all kinds. Indeed, the i-Structure course is itself deeply rooted in the idea of using graphical statics to understand intuitively the behavior of structures. Considering in addition that the course is aimed at Civil Engineering and Architecture students, who are both traditionally strongly graphics-orientated (the latter even more than the former), it is essential that the pictures prepared within the course be of excellent quality.

The purpose of the present article is not to explain how to create such material, which is an art and clearly also the responsibility of the individual authors. Rather, its purpose is to give good design practices for material that will be published on the web, but will also on occasion need to be published in another matter, as for example as part of a poster presentation or an article.

Work with large files

A rather long time ago, in computer terms, it was quite difficult to work with large graphics files, for example obtained by scanning. Therefore, each individual involved in producing material including scanned documents developed his own strategy to limit the negative impact on the editing process. Nowadays, it is not uncommon for word-processing documents including pictures to reach into the tens of megabytes in size, without becoming unacceptably unstable. This should not be mistaken for an encouragement, especially in the light of the fact that printers, and especially color printers, rarely exceed an effective resolution in excess of 150 dpi (dots, or pixels, per inch). The classical value is that the “fineness” of the detail rendered by a printer is one fourth of the used resolution of the printer (600 dpi translating into 150 dpi for a picture).