Last week we had an interesting discussion on what resolution you will design for in 2007 and the general consensus was that we are moving to bigger resolutions. However, with more and more devices becoming web-enabled it seems that they aren’t moving along with us. I know many of us have spent so much time waiting for the opportunity for the majority of users to move past 800×600 that it can be frustrating seeing a whole new batch start to use 640×480 again, but that is what is happening.
How do you handle these devices? You can argue for liquid designs, but in many cases if you have a 468×60 graphic ad on your site, it is not going to resize and therefore liquid design does not offer any help. What’s funny though is that these devices want to act like your everyday browser so they display websites just as any normal computer monitor would so often times you are left with scrollbars and headaches.
In this case is it the designer’s responsibility to create five different designs for 5000 different devices or do designers need a bit more help from the device makers? Maybe I’m out of touch here and there is an end-all solution for this problem and if so I’m always willing to listen.
Of course with the new iPhone and its Safari integration a whole new can of worms opens up.
Originally posted on January 9, 2007 @ 2:53 pm