Design for Mobiles

2005 may well go down as the year the future began. The information revolution has been a long one, beginning with the popularisation of desktop computers, continuing with the birth of the web and coming to full fruition with the mobile explosion of the 21st century. Current statistics suggest that there are now more mobile phones in the UK than there are people - around 80 per cent of us use them.

These numbers may be impressive, but what's really happening to mobile technology? Mobile phones are no longer just phones (in truth, they never were). The analysts missed out on this at first, not realising that the killer app wouldn't be voice-to-voice, but data services. This phenomenon took phone manufacturers and networks by surprise. In early 2000, text messaging was considered a marginal feature and provided for free, but the popularity and impact on systems became so great that the networks soon had to start charging. A wise decision considering that, in the UK alone, we now send around 50 million text messages a day.

But why is SMS so significant? It's a gateway technology that enables networks to deliver other types of content. The system the networks predicted would be the standard was the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) - a mobile technology based on internet standards. WAP is still significant, and becoming more important as mobile connection speeds get faster, but SMS enables networks to charge for content in ways that users find easy and familiar.

While SMS is essential for payment structures, the key delivery technologies have only recently entered the mainstream, following a successful bidding war for "3G" bandwidth in 2004. 3G is much like broadband for mobile phones - a way of connecting to data services alongside voice traffic. 3G services are "always on" connections with typical data rates of 384Kbits per second - although they're capable of up to 1920Kbits/s. More widely used 2.5G or GPRS services connect at a more sedate 56Kbits per second.

3D and video, and not all of it requires specialist programming or layout skills. At the bottom rung of the ladder are mobile phone themes, background images and wallpaper. This type of content is easy to create for designers used to working with standard illustration and photo-editing tools and, alongside ring tones, accounts for a large proportion of the ubiquitously advertised mobile content market.

With the latest handsets, and PDA hybrid "smart phones" in particular, things get a bit more sophisticated. The mobile games market is going through something of a renaissance, and last year's Nokia n-Gage now faces a number of challengers. You don't need a dedicated handset to play games, though - the most popular downloads on the mobile platform have been simple classics like Tetris (which last year spent eight months in the industry's download charts).

In the same way, a clever blend of imaginative graphics and straightforward game play sealed the recent success of Yetisports (www.yetisports.org). This time, you're a yeti batting around penguins with a baseball bat. Relying on simple interaction - you compete to beat your previous score and the scores of others - the design boasts a viral element that keeps you coming back for more. The Yetisports games are among many that run on Java-enabled phones, but as more handsets ship with vector animation players, we're likely to see an increase in made-for-mobile movies and viral cartoons. 3G networks such as Vodafone Live and the 3 Network are making much of the market for streamed video clips. How much designers will be able to contribute remains to be seen, but some lucrative deals have already been struck. The Grand National was recently delivered to 3 Network customers on demand, while NTL is trialling mobile TV services. But it's not all animation. WAP services are still breathing and as phones become more sophisticated it's getting easier to design for mobile devices, too. The current standard is a cut-down version of XHTML for mobile platforms, though many smart phones can now browse "normal" websites - providing they're W3C compliant. Award-winning apps such as the Live Departure Board system at www.nationalrail.co.uk lead the way with simple design and straightforward functionality.

The design problems are, in some ways, a little more mundane. You'll be creating content that you hope will display gracefully on multiple handsets and at unpredictable resolutions. While 240x320 pixels seems to be default at the higher-end of the market, screen real estate can be much smaller. This means making a decision early on whether you want to target high-end phones, stick with the mid-range median of 180x220 or aim for a more generic 120x120.

As with any "new" development medium, there's a learning curve to climb, as Kris Honeycutt of cuttingedge mobile and web design company Solid Thinking admits: "I recently worked on a little Flash Lite (1.0) project, a small animation created from an imported sequence of alpha transparent PNG files," he explains. "But the transparency in the animation wouldn't work on the mobile platform I was porting it to." Honeycutt discovered that the solution was to export the files from Macromedia Fireworks at 32bits instead of Photoshop at 24. It's trial and error situations like this that underline the youth of the medium.

PLATFORM PROTOCOLS
There are further issues of compatibility to consider, too - but as this is an area that's still developing, there's no broad agreement. Curiously, the situation on mobile platforms is virtually the reverse of the web. The predominant mobile technology for running interactive content such as games is a version of Java - J2ME. While Flash has saturated the web, Java's cross-platform, C-like structure has made it an ideal technology for writing games and mini-apps. This has made it hard for lone designers to make inroads into the market, but that's set to change. , now available on around 40 handsets, is Macromedia's cutdown version of Shockwave Flash for mobile phones. Exceedingly popular in Japan on the NTTDoCoMo network, it boasts ActionScript capabilities comparable to Flash 4, is adequate for delivering games and is an excellent method for creating animation. It has a rival, though. SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) has made little impact on the web, but the World Wide Web Consortium-endorsed format is well represented on many mobile platforms. There are several Mobile SVG players in circulation - including the Flash Lite Player - but the tools for content creation lack the sophistication of Flash so far. However, given Adobe's recent acquisition of Macromedia, this problem could soon be rectified. There's already an impressive, if overpriced, production tool called Ikivo Animator, which looks like an early version of Flash and integrates well with the Mobile SVG support already included with Adobe GoLive CS2 and Illustrator.

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The Creative Bloq team is made up of a group of design fans, and has changed and evolved since Creative Bloq began back in 2012. The current website team consists of eight full-time members of staff: Editor Georgia Coggan, Deputy Editor Rosie Hilder, Ecommerce Editor Beren Neale, Senior News Editor Daniel Piper, Editor, Digital Art and 3D Ian Dean, Tech Reviews Editor Erlingur Einarsson and Ecommerce Writer Beth Nicholls and Staff Writer Natalie Fear, as well as a roster of freelancers from around the world. The 3D World and ImagineFX magazine teams also pitch in, ensuring that content from 3D World and ImagineFX is represented on Creative Bloq.

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