While the Treaty of Babel standard for IF bibliographic data prescribes an ‘ideal’ size for IF cover art as 960 px x 960 px, itch favours a much more modest size of cover art (630 x 500) than that.
Which size cleaves closer to the norm of IF cover art now? Does cover art tend to follow the IF community’s standard or the de facto standard set by using itch as a distribution platform?
I think it’s more having a suite of images to suit the platform and promotional needs/wants.
Yeah, Austin is right on. If you look beyond IF at the overall social media landscape, you’ll see that every platform has its own size requirements, and different sizes for different types of post. It’s not about the dimension (960x960 vs 630x500) but rather about the aspect ratio (in this case 1x1 vs roughly 1.25:1). The best (or at least most widely compatible) practice is to generate source art at a high resolution ( 1x1 @ 1920x1920 should cover all cases) and design in such a way that the art can be repositioned or cropped or letterboxed to work at a variety of aspect ratios.
Just for example, here are Facebook’s image sizes (and I’m not saying you’d ever want to post to Facebook, but just offering it as a typical example). Also true for app stores, if you were ever to publish a game for Apple or Android, for instance!
The square aspect ratio winds up being more important than the pixel size. You have to customize your art for Itch’s rectangle. (And, separately, for Steam’s rather long list of aspect ratios that it uses in different contexts.)
IF systems stick to square (see IFComp, Lectrote cover display, etc).
