# Screen size to design for?



## Jason (Feb 11, 2003)

What screensize do you guys think i should design for? Currently my design (jasonharbourdesign.com) is made with 800x600 users in mind, but to me it seems a bit small... what do you guys think?


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## Giaguara (Feb 11, 2003)

I use 800x600 normally as well. Nothing is more painful than horizontal scrolling to read something. 
In US you have in media bigger screens - I see the differences in some statistics.


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## Ricky (Feb 11, 2003)

My site is 800x600, and that's how it will stay, always.    BUT it also stretches to fit the window.  The minimum size is 800x600.


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## Androo (Feb 11, 2003)

My site is for 1024x768, more is better


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## toast (Feb 12, 2003)

770*550.
800*600 minus space for toolbars.


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## Trip (Feb 12, 2003)

I recall a discussion about this on a designer forum a few months ago, we came to a conclusion that by designing for 800x600 everybody can get the "big picture", because a lot of users these days actually do have resolutions of 800x600. Me for example.


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## podmate (Feb 12, 2003)

I usually design for 1024x600.
But, I put all of the main content in the 800x600 section of the page and any other content in the extra space.


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## Vard (Feb 12, 2003)

I think, and this is just my uneducated opinion, that it likely depends on your intended audience for the site.

For a site that is geared toward graphic designers-likely computer savy people-designing for larger screen sizes is not only ok, but it some cases preferable.

However, some sites are geared more towards a less computer-savy community.  In this situation designing for larger screen sizes would be counter productive.  Designing for 800, or even 640, might actually be more beneficial.  

I only say all this because I have many older friends that find my computer screen size to small to see.  They keep theirs at 800x600, and yes, I have a couple that even use 640x480.  Designing a site that I wanted them to be able to view would require me to adjust accordingly.

Later.


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## twister (Feb 12, 2003)

Our web design company designs at 750x450.  We feel that most people (general public not computer geeks  ) browse at 800x600 and we want to give them a little room for toolbars, scrollbars, and the like.


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## lurk (Feb 12, 2003)

As a user who runs at 1280x1024 and who's hardware goes to 11! (well 1920x1440 ) Let me plead for you not to fix things so that they will not scale to higher resolutions.  There is many an e-commerce site that has lost my business because I could not make out the stupid 8 pixel font they were using.

So where is the fifth choice "I design my sites to be resolution independent" 

-Eric


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## twister (Feb 12, 2003)

good idea lurk but what about those people who have 640 x 480 screens?  Wouldn't that make the site hell for them?

I understand that some people have HUGE resolutions and some have small resolutions.  It makes it hard to design.  I prefer not to design things not to scale up because it causes sites to look worse due to the fact that there is not enough content to fill that large of an area.

That just my opinion though.


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## lurk (Feb 12, 2003)

> _Originally posted by twister _
> *good idea lurk but what about those people who have 640 x 480 screens?  Wouldn't that make the site hell for them?*



Well... that is why I said scale and to be fair I  surf at about 800x700 when you take into account that I don't run with the browser window full screen.



> *
> I understand that some people have HUGE resolutions and some have small resolutions.  It makes it hard to design.  I prefer not to design things not to scale up because it causes sites to look worse due to the fact that there is not enough content to fill that large of an area.
> *



I am of the mind that you should just scale up your content then.   Just because I am viewing your web page at a higher resolution does not mean that I am giving it any more of my visual area as at a lower resolution.   Maybe all I want from a higher resolution is crisper fonts.  

As an interesting parallel think about printers.  I have moved form an old 9-pin dot matrix printer up to 2400 dpi laser printer.  Does that mean I should put a thousand times more text on a page?  Why should display technology be any different?

Just a wonderin'
-Eric

P.S. It is nasty cold out today isn't it.


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## twister (Feb 12, 2003)

Yes it's cold.  

Ok just out of curiosity, am i missing something.  What do you mean by scale up?  I'm thinking in the mind set that you scale a window and if a table is 100% it scales up with the wiindow (like MACOSX.com).  Can you do that with text to?  So the text gets bigger with the window?


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## toast (Feb 12, 2003)

> _Originally posted by Trip _
> *I recall a discussion about this on a designer forum a few months ago*



I also recall this discussion on a designer forum called www.desktoppublishing.com/boards . Check it and search for "Web dimension", you'll find a thread I launched with some proposals about Web screen size.


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## mac-blog (Feb 12, 2003)

Most PC users I have found use 800x600. This is not because they can't have large resolutions, it is because many of their apps are designed so that they only go full screen at 800x600 (and they can deal with apps that aren't full screen).

I actually know PC people with beautiful 19" monitors running at 800x600 because of this.

Personally, I make all my browser windows to about 800x600 so that they cascade nicely when I have a number of them open. As a Mac user I'm used to multitasking, so I can't stand a window taking over most of my screen.


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## lurk (Feb 12, 2003)

> _Originally posted by twister _
> *Yes it's cold.
> 
> Ok just out of curiosity, am i missing something.  What do you mean by scale up?  I'm thinking in the mind set that you scale a window and if a table is 100% it scales up with the wiindow (like MACOSX.com).  Can you do that with text to?  So the text gets bigger with the window? *



If the text sizes are specified in points or just relatively then I can scale it up in my browser just fine. for instance in Safari you can just use CMD+ and CMD- to change the base font size and all is peachy.  The problem comes when someone specifies text or tables in pixels and overrids my preference then things break.  

Small fonts are also annoying on my Unix boxes which use free TrueType or Postscript font engines that don't do low resolution font hinting( for patent reasons.)  Under those conditions any 8 pixel font is going to be fairly illegible.

Honestly things have gotten much better in recent years but whenever I see "Our site best viewed at 640x400" I am racked with flashbacks of squinting at some tiny text the designer saw fit to prevent my enlarging or god forbid rendered as a gif...shudder... 

Have fun,

-Eric


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## goynang (Feb 12, 2003)

I wouldn't get too hung up on screen size. As someone else pointed out, not everyone runs their browser full screen. Also, why build a site to an exact pixel size if the content would fit just as well in a browser window that was 20 pixels smaller (or wider for that matter) than you had planned.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: if at all possible use a flexible design/layout that can adapt to the users browser size - whatever it might be.

This is slowly getting easier with better CSS support but I appreciate is still a painful process.

One thing that I can never understand is where a site is approx. 820 pixels wide!!! Those extra few pixels really aren't necessary and they are making those people that are at 800x600 definitely get a horizontal scroll bar, even at full screen. I see this quite a lot and it never fails to amaze me.

P.S. I didn't vote as there was no option for 'design for all sizes'.


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## edX (Feb 12, 2003)

goynang, lurk, et al. - there is now an option for resolution independent so we can vote. i've already cast the first one there. 

i'll add that i really only think this matters with professional sites. low level homepage designers like myself will continue to be satisfied with just getting a page up and viewable - how pretty to the last detail is way down the list of priorities in such a case. i'll spend my efforts making it easy to navigate, but other than that, i probably make all my fonts too big for younger eyes tastes anyway. i like to be able to see my sites even if nobody else does.


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## toast (Feb 13, 2003)

"Resolution independent" sites with taags such as <table="70%"> are longer to load. I thought this ought to be precised.


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## Jason (Feb 13, 2003)

making a resolution independent site gives me less flexibility as a designer though, no?

and what happens when they have a small window, everything will get squished together and unreadable, id rather have them scroll then not beable to navigate...

as far as fonts, i always make my fonts pts based, all you have to do is press command +... also if you cant read a normal size font because of your resolution then IMHO the resolution isnt doing you much good


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## goynang (Feb 14, 2003)

> making a resolution independent site gives me less flexibility as a designer though, no?



That's a fair enough point if the site is like Ed says, just your own bit of fun. If it's a commerical site or something like this site that is going to get viewed by a large and varied audience then surely that audience is far far far far far far more important than 'your flexibility as a designer'.

I'm not having a go at you per se but that kind of thinking is why a large chunk of the web is so bad in my opinion. Too many people creating sites for themselves and not for the people who will end up using them.

As regards the other point someone made about percentage based tables being slower - don't even get me started about using tables for page layouts rather than just data! Proper, well written semantic CSS driven markup will be quicker every time (when it works ;o)

As you may have guessed I'm a bit keen on web standards (www.webstandards.org et al) even if browser support thereof drives me crazier than it's safe to get in public.


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## Jason (Feb 15, 2003)

so im not supposed to think about myself when making a personal site? heh, thats weird


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## Jason (Feb 15, 2003)

oh btw i'll try to make it flexible, but im not a programmer


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## TommyWillB (Feb 15, 2003)

> _Originally posted by lurk _
> *As a user who runs at 1280x1024 and who's hardware goes to 11! (well 1920x1440 ) Let me plead for you not to fix things so that they will not scale to higher resolutions.  There is many an e-commerce site that has lost my business because I could not make out the stupid 8 pixel font they were using.
> 
> So where is the fifth choice "I design my sites to be resolution independent"
> ...


Amen brother!


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## Ricky (Feb 15, 2003)

> _Originally posted by Jason _
> *oh btw i'll try to make it flexible, but im not a programmer  *


You know, a flexible web site does not have to be ugly.  You see them all over the place but you don't notice it because they made the scaling subtle.
http://www.citystar.com/ and
http://www.35ravenglass.com/
Two examples of sites I made that scale to fit the page.  They look nice, yes?


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## TommyWillB (Feb 15, 2003)

> _Originally posted by toast _
> *"Resolution independent" sites with taags such as <table="70%"> are longer to load. I thought this ought to be precised. *


 That is not totally true.

The fact is that a browser must determine the actual widths of everything before it can correctly render table widths, etc. In the older Netscapes it simply refused to render anything until it determined that. In IE it happily rearanges the tables as things are being figured out.

The way to make the tables settle in quickly is to make sure that ALL images ALWAYS have height + width tags. So should tables. And if you are using fixed table sizes make sure the math works out. If you have three cells at 20 pixels each but the table is set at 100 pixels, that will throw things off.

The trick to getting things to render (note this is a rendering speed issue and not a download speed issue) make sure you give the browser as much info to work with. Omitting things make the browser figure it out... and not all browsers make the same decisions.


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## TommyWillB (Feb 15, 2003)

> _Originally posted by Jason _
> *so im not supposed to think about myself when making a personal site? heh, thats weird  *


Personal sites... Yeah... Do whatever you want.

Like goynang I always suggest to our designers that making a Web page that operates like a Web page (strechy, user deciding what font size, etc) is just part of the design challenge.

The web is not print. The Web is not TV. You have to desing for this medium, and that means you have to let go of pixel level placement in exchange for a site that works at multiple resolutions. (I always feel cheated when I encounter a 640x480 site glued to the top left corner of my browser running in 1280x1024 mode.)
To me this just makes everything more interesting and more fun... but I can see why designers would be pulling their hair out.


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## goynang (Feb 15, 2003)

> The web is not print. The Web is not TV. You have to desing for this medium



I hereby shake TommyWillB by the hand!

You get it - now if we can just work on the rest of the world.


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## mersyone (Mar 6, 2007)

Thankx!


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## ora (Mar 6, 2007)

The last post in the thread before you was "February 15th, 2003, 11:55 PM"


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## billbaloney (Mar 6, 2007)

Amazing...I responded to the first page.  My bad!


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## PuckJunky (Mar 10, 2007)

Hi Jason,

I had the same dilemma recently and had not checked out the typical web statistic sites in a while. What I found is that -roughly-  70+% of all web users employ a resolution of 1024x768 or higher, so this situation is improving. Especially if you're not catering to users with older computers, etc. Know thy audience first and foremost but this should be safe.

-PJ


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