At 6/1/2007 10:09 AM, Andrew Maben wrote:
On Jun 1, 2007, at 12:07 PM, Felix Miata wrote:
Or, quit thinking like a print designer. Embrace the variability that is a
browser viewport. Size relatively, which can work for 200x400 and all the
way up as high as high gets.
With respect, I think this is a rather over simplistic response, at
least if I'm correctly interpreting your intent.
You seem to be suggesting that a design or layout should be
conceived as a rectangle with arbitrary relative dimensions, and
that those dimensions should be preserved at all resolutions through
relative sizing? Sorry, but that sounds like print thinking to me,
and in that case how small is the text going to be at 200x400 if
it's presentable at 800x600?
If I'm missing your point, I'd love to see some clarifying examples.
Meanwhile, whilst I do indeed "embrace the variability", there are
literally infinite possible variations to the size and proportion of
the browser viewport. I humbly suggest that it is unreasonable to
expect, and frankly, impossible to achieve a design that will be
uniformly "brilliant" in every case. While of course the variety of
possible modes of final presentation have to be kept in mind, the
initial design work is going to have to take place on a fixed-size
canvas. If one sets what I think is the reasonable aim of producing
a design that will look as good as possible in any presentation
mode, then it follows that there are presentation modes in which it
will look better than others. Hence it makes sense to attempt to
find some congruence between looking better and the probability of
any particular presentation mode. I'm not advocating, and I don't
believe Lea was either, that the ideal is to create a design that is
in some abstract and necessarily highly subjective sense "perfect"
for one particular window size and screen resolution and
progressively worse in any other environment, but rather to look as
good as possible in the widest possible range of environments while
accepting that some environments are going to be more common, and
that right now a screen resolution of 1024x768 is perhaps the most
common. I think this an honest and honorable goal, and there are
many options at our disposal in our attempts to achieve it, one, but
only one, of which is certainly relative sizing.
Very well stated, Andrew.
In my experience on the markup/styling/programming side of website
production, one of the problems I've had working with graphic
designers (which nearly always means print designers) is that they
come up with one single page design and figure their job is
done. When I translate that to the web I often have to do the rest
of the design job -- primarily, figuring out how the design will
morph when text and window sizes change. I'm handed a single
still-frame and asked to produce the movie, and often hear complaints
when every other frame of the movie looks different from the
first. Well, that's just the reality of the medium. I prioritize
the various aspects of the original design so that, as it changes,
the mutated forms carry the most aspects of the designer's vision to the user.
Here's the kind of priority list I'm talking about, assuming a
typical web page of text and images:
- The text on the page must be readable as text size increases. This
is my bottom line: if you can't read the text, the page has failed in
its fundamental transaction with the viewer and loses its reason for existing.
- The page layout should survive to the greatest extent
possible. These days I like to size block widths in ems so that the
whole page enlarges with the font, preserving the proportions of the
design. (Whether the images should resize along with their
containers differs from one job to the next.) I halt enlargement at
window width so that folks with weak vision aren't forced to scroll
horizontally (that would merely drive most people away). This means
that the blocks on the page maintain their proportions and positional
relationships until we reach the window width, then they start
distorting, stretching vertically.
- When the page contains two or more columns of text (true of nearly
all pages I'm given to produce), a couple of things can happen:
a) The layout stops expanding horizontally at window width,
becoming in practical terms a fixed-width layout; continued text
enlargement will eventually cause text to spill out of its
containers, overlap, and become unreadable. The hope is that by
allowing the layout to expand to window width before halting, the
user will have had a chance to enlarge the font so much that they'll
be able to read it before spill-over occurs.
b) The columns can be floated next to one another so that
when the horizontal space can no longer contain them they begin to
drop down from a horizontal sequence to a vertical sequence.
Both of these scenarios dramatically alter the original graphic
design of the page, but that's inevitable if one is to avoid
horizontal scrolling.
A page that's engineered to survive text enlargement this way will
also survive display in a wide variety of window widths (and screen
resolutions). Obviously there are limits to accommodation: if you
enlarge the text until a single long word won't fit in your window
width, horizontal scrolling or hidden text is inevitable. It's my
job to minimize those effects.
I'm not too worried that a page optimized for 1024 will look very
different, even homely, at 800 or 600. Readability comes first,
layout second. At times this seems to put me at odds with graphic
designers, but really I'm just trying to help them reach the audience
with as much of their vision intact as possible.
Regards,
Paul
__________________________
Paul Novitski
Juniper Webcraft Ltd.
http://juniperwebcraft.com
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