PORTRAIT OR LANDSCAPE?

Dick Pountain /Idealog 349/ 04 Aug 2023 10:25 I don’t know whether it’s just me becoming a grouchy old man, but TV adverts seem to have become more imbecilic over the last year or two, and one that particularly saddens me is when that girl sees someone using a Samsung Flip phone and is so overcome with consumer-lust that she runs away to join ‘the flip side’. Esteemed editor Tim recently asked as a ‘masthead question’ whether we editors were tempted by such bendy phones and what would make us buy one, and I replied “The Galaxy Fold tempts me for use as a camera, and what would make me buy one is a price reduction of exactly one order of magnitude”. The reason I fancied the Fold (price apart) is simply that it alters the screen’s aspect ratio from portrait to almost square. The shift from desktop PCs to laptops barely affected the aspect ratio via which we absorb our digital content, which remained mildly landscape at around 4:3 (also roughly the shape of cinema and TV screens in olden times). Cinema went widescreen from the 1960s but it took till the early 2000s for laptops and TVs to follow suit with 16:9 or 16:10, still landscape but more so. That all changed at a stroke when the smartphone took over the world, with its thin upright portrait format around twice as high as wide. (And before you say it, I do know you can turn a phone on its side, but people only do that to watch movies and the user interface is designed for portrait). Does this matter? Well, yes, to me it does, but I only barely understand why it is that I prefer landscape. Is the real world portrait or landscape? That depends on where you live: the highlands of Scotland are awesomely landscape but where I live in central London is very much portrait, streets lined with buildings that obscure any horizon, some so tall you have to lean back to view them. The very terms themselves of course evolved in the era of classic oil painting, when rich folk who could afford it had one done sprawled with dogs and dead pheasants at their rolling country estate, and one upright in a chair in the town house. Portrait puts you at the centre of attention, as millions of selfie-sticks will testify. As a keen photographer I’m sensitive to the effects of field–of-view on composition, of different focal lengths and of film formats (the real pros often prefer square). What about physiology? The human retina is circular (more exactly a section of sphere) but the eye itself is oval thanks to its lids, with a horizontal field-of-view around 178o and vertical of 135o (60o upward and 75o downward). When looking straight ahead your eyes have a 95o field of view from nose to periphery, so rather unsurprisingly our vision leans toward the landscape, where we had to chase things to eat for several hundred thousand years. But I no longer have to chase my dinner over the hills, so that can’t be it. More to the point is that my digital existence nowadays lies in the borderland between phone and laptop. I use a Chromebook that looks like a landscape laptop but also runs Android, so that many of the apps I try were designed for phones with a portrait UI. The better ones do let me expand the window to fit and don’t assume I have a touch screen: the crappier ones do neither and go straight to bin. Among the big guns Facebook drifts inexorably toward portrait, following its acquisition of Instagram and introduction of Reels, while Amazon, because of Kindle, has become skilled at adapting to different screen and font sizes. Nowadays I read so many books in Kindle format that I’ve started using my Galaxy tablet again, and the non-fiction and tech papers I read or review are mostly PDFs that adapt easily to any aspect ratio. For many early years I was Dennis Publishing’s print buyer and hence intimately familiar with paper sizes. The printers’ A sizes all have the same aspect ratio of √2:1 or 1.4142, so that folding them in half - when printing book or magazine sections - retains the same aspect ratio. I’ve often wished, in vain, that the computer industry had adopted these A sizes so that turning a phone or tablet on its side could neatly flip into two pages. That would have made phone screens a bit fatter, and PC/laptop screens a bit taller, and more like paper books. So my preference for landscape is probably, as one who’s been addicted to reading since childhood, for the comfort of double-spreads in an open book or magazine… [Dick Pountain has an aspect ratio of roughly 4.6:1 (when standing and viewed from the front)]