The Evolution of Resolution

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What are we trying to show here?

The challenge was to create content about mobile phones, for a company that allowed customers to compare phone and gadget insurance.

My colleague Matt came to me one day with an idea to show the evolution of the mobile phone.

But a quick Google image search revealed we weren’t the the first to consider such an idea – not even close!

However, after looking at all the different images that come up, I wasn’t sure what the point of them was.

They appeared to show that phones got a bit smaller then they got bigger again. But so what?!

To sharpen our ideas, I always like to ask:

“What’s the one thing we want this to show?”

In this case, the answer we came up with was that we wanted to show the evolution of screen resolution.

So that’s what we set out to do.

We decided to show the screen resolution for the best selling phones over time, from the old Nokia 5110 (that everyone of a certain age will remember) right through to the latest iPhone Plus at the time.

For example, the Nokia 5110 (released in 1998) had 84 x 48 pixels while the Motorola Razr (released in 2004) had 176 x 220 pixels.

I got the designer to compare the screen resolution of the different phones.

And it looked like this…

But there were a couple of problems with this.

It wasn’t very compelling, for a start. And it was too abstract.

Obviously, the iPhone Plus handset isn’t that much larger than the Nokia, so there was something unintuitive about this diagram too.

This would require some more thought…

Again, asking the question what exactly were we trying to show here?

And what’s actually happening, in the real world?

If you can get more precise with your questions and answers it can lead to a better solution.

In reality, pixels were getting much smaller, and phone screens were getting a little larger. But mostly, it’s about the pixels getting smaller.

So how could we show that?

We wrestled with the idea for a while, then eventually I came up with the idea of showing how many old Nokia screens could fit inside the latest iPhone Plus.

That made it much more concrete and relatable.

Would you care to hazard a guess at the answer?

How many old Nokia screens could fit inside the latest iPhone Plus?

The answer… 514!

Hopefully you found that answer a little surprising.

If it had just been 20 or 30, that would be a little underwhelming. And the idea would fall flat.

But 514?!

That’s a lot!

To bring the execution to life, we decided to show the Nokia screen within its original setting, then the handset would fall away, leaving only the screen.

This would then shrink down (to represent the shrinking of the pixels), and we’d show how many old Nokia screens would fit within the screen resolution of the next most popular model.

In this way, we were really communicating what was happening – pixels were shrinking considerably, and screen sizes were changing a little.

I also thought we could have pixels flying in from everywhere, like you were travelling through The Matrix in 3D! But I may have been getting carried away at that point.

Anyway, here’s some static screenshots of the journey we took people through, so they could more accurately appreciate the evolution of resolution over time.