What is the best way to create drawables for different dpi

Question

Do you create the MDPI drawable first and just scale it accordinly to the .075/1.00/1.50/2 ratio by pixels in photoshop or do you recreate each individual drawable?

Also is it better to start with a high quality image and start scaling it down or start with a MDPI image and just scale it up?

Here's what i do:

Create a mdpi image in photoshop with 320x480 porportions and 160 as it's resolution. Save 4 images and changing the resolution by simply entering 120,160, 240, or 320 as the resolution.

Answer 1

From the Android design guidelines:

Strategies

So where do you begin when designing for multiple screens? One approach is to work in the base standard (medium size, MDPI) and scale it up or down for the other buckets. Another approach is to start with the device with the largest screen size, and then scale down and figure out the UI compromises you'll need to make on smaller screens.

For more detailed information on this topic, check out Supporting Multiple Screens.

Answer 2

The tips for designers section of the Icon Design Guidelines has the following advice:

Use vector shapes where possible
When possible, use vector shapes so that if the need arises, assets can be scaled up without loss of detail and edge crispness.

Start with large artboards
Because you will need to create assets for different screen densities, it is best to start your icon designs on large artboards with dimensions that are multiples of the target icon sizes. For example, launcher icons are 96, 72, 48, or 36 pixels wide, depending on screen density. If you initially draw launcher icons on an 864x864 artboard, it will be easier and cleaner to tweak the icons when you scale the artboard down to the target sizes for final asset creation.

There are a number of other nice tips in that section. I think it's good advice for other drawable types as well (menu icons, backgrounds, etc.).

Answer 3

I generally start big, and move to smaller.

I find that powerpoint is actually a very nice tool for creating resources for my applications. All of the graphics are vector, so they scale up and down without any quality loss.

I tend to start with the big ones if for no other reason than it is easier to work with something that looks bigger. when I move to the smaller sized ones I generally zoom in some to compensate.

Any graphic object in powerpoint will allow you to right click it and choose "Save as picture" which will output it as a png file for you. Only thing left is to drop it into draw9patch if need be.