Using Retina/HiDPI assets in your Indiegogo campaign

In an ideal world you wouldn’t need to worry about the resolution of your design assets. That’s the utopia we can only dream of living in though. While the obvious solution would be to use vector assets wherever possible, eventually you will need to use a bitmap.

If that need arises while you are nailing down your fancy Indiegogo story to persuade everyone into funding your groundbreaking product, you’re in for a treat.

Turns out IGG not only optimises your bitmaps for you (good thing, even if it’s a tad more aggressive than necessary), it also won’t let you use the @2x assets you need for that extra crispiness. The upload is allowed but the higher quality file is automatically downsampled to the width of the layout — 695 pixels.

The workaround

The fix ended up being easier than expected. No, there’s no magic ✓ Keep it Retina switch…

SVG (and its ability to contain base64 encoded bitmaps) to the rescue once again! All you need to do is place the @2x (1390 pixels wide) bitmap into your Sketch file, ensure it’s set to the required width of 695 pixels and mark it for export as SVG. It seems Indiegogo doesn’t run any server‑side optimisation for vector files so even the encoded bitmap stays sharp. Sure it’s one step extra but it’s worth it for that glorious hi‑res goodness. Ain’t it?


Indiegogo actually requires some of the assets related to the campaign to be Retina-ready and officially supports SVGs in the Story part so I believe this is either an oversight or a simple way to prevent nontechnical people from uploading unoptimised images that would need more bandwidth than necessary. What I feel is needed to bold out though is the fact that you should optimise the bitmap before embedding it into the SVG so it’s only as big as it needs to be.