1024 is the new 800

Looks like I'm a trendsetter now :-) . Christian Montoya wrote a nice article on the general trends of the latest CSS reboot happening. 1024 pixel width, silk icons and light colours on dark backgrounds seem to be hip now. Got it all in my design and it even went online before the May 1st reboot day :-) The only thing currently missing is the “Beefy Footers” thing.

But I'm wondering about the fixed layouts. I just recently changed from a completly liquid one to a one with a maximum width. This is because lines are very hard to read if they get too long. On the other hand people with large monitors can't use them to the full with fixed layouts. I think fixed (or maximum-) widths are nessessary for the main content (eg. text) but the rest of the screen should be used better than currently in most designs. This could be done with the “Beefy Footers” mentioned above. Instead of defining them as footer per se, they should be treated as additional content column which floats down to be a footer on smaller screens.

Maybe I will implement it here later. All I need now are some ideas on what content to put into the footer/column.

Tags:: web2.0,; design,; beefyfooters

Similar posts:

Posted on Saturday, May the 6th 2006 (6 years ago).

Don't use fixed layouts... Instead, define all size values in pt (points) instead of px (pixels). Points are based on the DPI and on most Linux systems, and probably Windows Vista too, the DPI is automaticaly adjusted to the size of the monitor. And people using older version of Windows should always manually adjust the DPI. So if someone has a 21" monitor, then his DPI should be 150 or something, causing all the fonts and elements in your site to resize with it.

The only problem here is if you use a lot of images, they get too small since they are defined in px... One solution to this is to use big images and have all images resized on the fly with imagemagick or something depending on the users' resolution, or use SVGs (not supported in IE yet though... maybe use pics in IE and SVGs in Firefox based on the referer...)

2006-05-30 02:44:22

Yogarine