Doctoring with Borders - Page 12

On November 01 2013 07:34 wo1fwood wrote:
This is an incredibly nuanced issue to deal with in regards to how people use their devices. But basically, the width is an aesthetic design choice that coincidentally follows older legacy practices in designing webpages. As an example, the standard max-width for a long time was around 900-960px wide, and if you look at sites like nvidia or ign or even the ny times (there are tons of others), they are all around 972px wide. This is so that they can be viewed by as many users as possible and still be within the 1024 width so that no side scrolling has to occur. This is highly dependent though on your site-specific traffic though.

About 84% of TL users have a screen resolution larger than 720p, but whether they use a full sized viewport or not is an entirely different matter on top of this. So say we're talking about desktop users only, and assume that maybe the average users viewport is about 200px smaller than their total screen resolution (which isn't even always the case), what does that mean? Well I'm not sure how that data lies, but I can tell you that by designing to 100% of the viewport width, while it does afford using the maximum retail space, you still have to account for multiple resolutions down to the median-width at least, and especially smaller resolutions than 1024. This is why responsive design is starting to really gain momentum, because you can design 1 site, that works everywhere from your old 480x320 iphone to a 4k screen. And that would be a collosal project for TL.

Disregarding some of the facepalms in Win 8's functionality, it's beautiful and mostly well thought out visually (tons of designers have followed major cues from metro in the last few years.... including Apple).