I have 2 relatively small pngs that will be images inside UIButtons.
Once our app is finished, we might want to resize the buttons and make them smaller.
Now, we can easily do this by resizing the button frame; the system automatically re-sizes the images smaller.
Would the system's autoresize cause the image to look ugly after shrinking the image? (i.e., would it clip pixels and make it look less smooth than if I were to shrink it in a photo editor myself?)
Or would it better to make the image the sizes they are intended to be?
It is always best to make the images of correct size from the beginning. All resize-functions will have negative impact on the end result. If you scale it up to a larger image it will be a big different, but even if you scale it down to a smaller it is usually creating visible noise in the image. Let's say that you have a line of one pixel in your image. scale it down to 90% of the original size, this line will just use 90% of a pixel wide and other parts of the images will influence the colors of the same pixels.