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What pixel width should a designer use for the PSD, given the pixel width of the website? (for example, I need a design for a website thats 1920px wide. What resolution should the designer use in photoshop?)

I'm a web developer and I always get PSDs from designers that are ridiculous arbitrary sizes. For example, I just got a PSD (for one single page of a website) that is well over a gigabyte, the image size / resolution is 5616px by 3744px. This makes it really difficult because I have to resize practically every element of the design. I have no idea why or how the designer chose to work in that resolution.

Personally, I would design at 2x the final website resolution, so I have retina images available..

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  • I googled "5616 x 3744" and it is exactly the resolution of a Canon camera RAW (such as EOS-1Ds Mark III). It also seems to coincide with an A1 sheet @ 180dpi according to Epson. Maybe a result of some Wood Table 2.0 wherein they took a photo of a whiteboard lying on a table and then worked it up by "alpharenumeralizing it digimally"
    – Yorik
    Oct 15, 2015 at 21:23
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    The design ideally should work at various resolutions. The rule of thumb we follow is that designs are provided at our minimum support desktop resolution (1024x768) and then any size over that just expands naturally. For resolutions smaller than that we do different designs.
    – Hanna
    Oct 16, 2015 at 4:52
  • Hi Phil, welcome to GDSE and thanks for your question. If you want to know more about the site, please see the help center or ping one of us in the Graphic Design Chat once your reputation is sufficient (20). Keep contributing and enjoy the site!
    – Vincent
    Oct 16, 2015 at 8:38

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I recommend keeping to 72 dpi and your target width of 1920 to establish layout template, you can always replace web images later via CMS or even manually. Chasing retina displays in the layout file will give you huge (500-700 MB and up) PSDs and there's just no need for that.

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your width should be ok in 1920px and in 72dpi. every images should be as it is in the psd mockup. And then tell your designer to give you a 2x version of the image in jpg separated on the psd.

http://designmodo.com/responsive-retina-images/

designer always put everything on the psd. there are different grid that designer follow, but the point is, during the process most designer put every images, 2x on the psd to have a single file, increasing the filesize.

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  • Hi Jayson, welcome to GDSE and thanks for your answer. If you have any questions, please see the help center or ping one of us in the Graphic Design Chat once your reputation is sufficient (20). Keep contributing and enjoy the site!
    – Vincent
    Oct 16, 2015 at 8:39

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