Call me Ishmail.
I began my career as a rogue marketer in the emerging web industry way back in 1998. I can still recall the anticipation and subsequent exhilaration at seeing, sometimes for the first time, my client’s virtual representation come to life in the form of a website composition design. A thing of beauty. A vision to behold. Thousands of tiny pixels coalescing to create images, colors, navigational flow and content. I remember the real challenge for designers and architects to be able to cram all of that information onto an amount of space that fit “above the fold”, given the low resolution of even the best computer monitors at that time. Pixel perfect was the name of the game and every bit of usable space was given immaculate attention to detail. And then I remember the dreaded line, the imposing wall that design sat perilously close to, a hair’s width away from seemingly falling into the abyss. I am, of course, referring to the hindrance of the time that forced designers to cut, sometimes violently so, their aesthetic vision for the sake of early resolution limitations. In order to accommodate lower resolutions and ensure that content would not get cut off or require horizontal scrolling, designers had to design with the lowest common denominator in mind. Sadly, this often meant that upwards of 40% of a screen’s usable space (20% on either side) was delegated to useless wallpaper decoration.
Here is a screen capture from a previous version of our own DeepBlue site:
In 1995, 640×480 resolution monitors were the biggest and best monitors available. This meant that web designers focused on making pages that looked good in web browsers maximized on a 12–14-inch monitor at that resolution. These days, 640×480 resolution makes up less than 1% of most website traffic. Instead, people are using computers with 1366×768, 1600×900, and 1920×1080 resolution.
The good news for modern web designers is that screen size and resolution is no longer anything to really worry about, practically speaking. The best solution these days is to use CSS media queries and responsive design, a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices and screen sizes. Designers are able to re-think their entire concept of what a design actually is. No longer are we bound by the limitations of resolution. Pixel perfect is now as archaic a notion as driving to Blockbuster to pick out a flick. A website design is no longer looked at as a painting – something to be fitted inside a frame and mounted onto a wall – but rather as a fluid entity that must navigate down-river and adapt accordingly to its ever-changing environment. True, the myriad of screen sizes does create challenges, specifically with devices we deem to be in-betweeners, but these challenges can all be overcome using adaptive techniques. Web is not print, and with responsive design the web has finally reached its potential and become an independent communications medium, as unique as print, television and radio. Designers who have yet to adopt these modern principles do so at the risk of becoming obsolete.
Our next blog will be taking on a hot debate that builds upon this post. We will discuss the pros and cons of designing in the browser versus Photoshop. Are you one of those in the camp that believes it’s time for Photoshop to be killed off?
Frank Farris
Frank Farris is Founder and CEO of DeepBlue. He has been an active thought leader in the application of emerging web technologies since 1998 and is a champion of the movement to make the Responsive Web Design approach the new industry standard. Frank loves his Ducati and a really good martini, sometimes at the same time.
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