Thread:The S/@comment-995426-20171204101225/@comment-995426-20171204115856

Ahh, I must have overlooked that in the manual of style. I have to confess that I've been doing 400px comic cover images on Turtlepedia for a long time without any real clashes.

It's true that my eyesight keeps sliding, even into my late 30s, with worsening myopia and astigmatism, so I get a new eye exam and a new pair of glasses every few years. But I think part of the problem is not as much the size of the monitor, but my need to sit back and see the entire screen at once without confining too much of it to my peripheral vision. That means when I upgraded from 1024px wide to 1600px wide, the amount of areal detail increased, but I had to view it further away from my face, and thus it all appears smaller. What was previously okay with 250px, I needed 400px to see with the same comfort. So what's still 250px now, looks more like how it used to look at 160px. At that size it's less of a page side illustration and more of a tiny thumbnail&mdash;enough to identify that images are different from each other, but not as good to identify things like "Which character is that in the artwork?" The details of comic covers help your memory identify one cover from another by a glance, and it helps the most if from a glance you can distinguish large and medium-level details. At 250px on a 1600px display, far enough from my face to view the whole screen comfortably, an image of that size is only really good enough to distinguish large-level details, which is why I find myself squinting trying to scan for those medium-level details.

So I guess it's less about the quality of my vision, and more the way my brain processes the visual information my eyes can see, and the quirky way it prioritizes that information at a glance. Some details are very easy for me to notice, like the tiny shapes and contours of text typefaces, which I tend to be very sensitive to. But some details are harder to notice. Growing up, even with the best glasses, I would often overlook objects in plain sight because my brain hadn't adequately encapsulated the information so I could readily match what was in my field of vision with what was in my mind. Often it was for seemingly small reasons, like looking at objects at an unfamiliar angle. My mother kept scolding me for not seeing objects under my nose when asked to look for them: "If it were a snake, it would bite you." Today, I always practice those visual object recognition skills however I can, and I've gotten a lot better at it than when I was a child. But there's being able to see something, and then there's what is comfortable to see, and my brain still prioritizes information the same fundamental way it did when I was a child.

I'm not saying this should be a reason to change the way Turtlepedia articles are displayed. I'm just one person, after all, and I admittedly have an abnormal nervous system that is hypersensitive in some ways and insensitive in other ways. When it comes down to it, I guess I can live with 250px. But I thought it might be helpful to talk a little more about where I'm coming from, as it certainly influences my fuzzier stylistic judgments in editing.