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Hello fellow designers.

I have to make a banner promoting a mobile application. The banner size is 80x200 cm.

So, normal screenshots of the application screens will be too small. There are too many screenshots to trace all of them in illustrator, and the "Image trace" function won't work because there is a lot of text in the application.

The app is fully responsive, so there should be no problem scaling it in a browser or a emulator.

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  • I think I read this wrong.. you are making a banner promoting a mobile application not "for" a mobile application. I'm going to edit the question a bit to make it clearer.
    – Scott
    Sep 4, 2014 at 17:23

5 Answers 5

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You don't need to create a giant screen shot. You need to take a screen shot, then enlarge it to fit your banner. Which is fine. There's no need to recreate the screen shot. It's a screen shot. It's OK if its a bit pixelated (especially at the size of a banner)

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  • its pretty hard for most designers to specify to the printer that it should not use the normal interpolation routine. But rather, use nearest neibourhood sampling in the RIP/Printer rasterizer. Mainly because most software dont give you the option, altough the underlying printer language does. Hence vector recreation ideas...
    – joojaa
    Sep 5, 2014 at 19:56
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    I wouldn't want the printer to be doing any interpolation. Rather, the designer should be handling that in the process of making the file for the printer to print.
    – DA01
    Sep 5, 2014 at 19:58
  • printer as in machine not person or organisation. And yes your printing device usually interpolates at halftone generation time. if you havent written your own postscript this is what you do.
    – joojaa
    Sep 5, 2014 at 20:00
  • @joojaa that shouldn't have any noticeable affect. If you take the screen shot, and then enlarge it yourself in whatever software you are using to make the banner, whether it's raster or vector won't matter much (if at all) in terms of the halftones. The device has to rasterize the halftones to create the halftones anyways. Besides, no one is going to notice the halftones on a banner.
    – DA01
    Sep 5, 2014 at 20:03
  • no not the halftones but the interpolation induced by the halftoning algorithm quite often blur the image. See the halftone by default assumes the image is continnious while the asker wants it to be discrete.
    – joojaa
    Sep 5, 2014 at 20:14
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Go fullscreen (f11). Zoom in with your browser (ctrl + wheel) and take multiple screenshots and combine them later in Photoshop. Pretty straight forward and easy.

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If you're on a Mac you can use the Paparazzi screenshot app it's free and takes full website length screenshots.

Other screenshot commands on Mac are:

  • Full Screen Command+Shift+3
  • Selection Command+Shift+4
  • Window Command+Shift+4 Release then press Spacebar

These screenshots will all be saved to your desktop

If you add Control to any of the above commands the screenshot will only be saved to your clipboard and you can then paste it right into Photoshop or any other app.

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In most cases, for high quality work, you need to recreate the screens. I wouldn't mess with any auto tracing even if it was an option.

I'd take some standard screen shots, place them in Illustrator to use as a guide, then manually recreate the elements. This may take more time and be a good deal of work depending upon what you need. However, this is really the best way to ensure fantastic end results when needing anything of that final size.

There simply is no "trick" which is going to work well when trying to show a mobile screen on a banner/billboard. But you should be aware that most large scale printing is done at low resolution (150ppi or even lower). Depending on how you plan on producing the banner, you may want to speak with the production company about resolutions needed.

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I will be duplicating DA01 answer. DO NOT RECREATE THE APP!

Make a screenshot on a retina device perhaps, but the banner, the poster needs NOT to be at low resolution. Find a high-resolution image, or simply generate your add at high resolution and post a real screenshot.

enter image description here

If it is a front view of the app I would use an exact multiplier of the resolution of the app.

Let's say in my composite (inside CorelDraw I posted my screenshot at 72 ppi. Well, my total export would be 4x, this is, 72x4 = 288 ppi.

This way I maintain the pixels of the app. No interpolation there.

Open the image in a new window. If you want, open it in PhotoWhatever and see the ppi.

Image updated.

enter image description here

(One problem in my image is that my browser is now adding a subpixel on the screenshot. you can probably use an older browser to render the preview)

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