Liquid Design

September 16, 2003 | View Comments (0) | Design

Yes I know it is a very corny title, but I think it is catchy. Anyways, the point of this non-sensical post is to talk about liquid design. Some of you may have forgotten what liquid design is so I will try to give you a quick refresher. It is when a site is designed to fit and adjust to almost any resolution thrown at it. For some reason all of the good looking sites I go to nowadays do not do this. Why is this? Does this mean that to have a good looking site it has to have a fixed width of 750px? I certainly hope not. In the late 90's-2001 we were all preaching the benefits of what good liquid design could do for the user. Screen resolutions were increasing so it only made sense to create a site that would scale with these increasing screen sizes. But the idea has died...or is at least in hibernation.

Some time ago Zeldman preached about liquid design. I believe I even saw it in one of his books one time or another. He certainly did it with A List Apart so why not with his site? To me liquid does not just mean that the header spreads across the whole screen, but the content also. I wonder why he made this decision. It sucks looking at his site with a resolution of 1600x1200 because I get caught up in all the whitespace on the right side. This might seem like bitching and I guess it should only be taken as that because I cannot criticize someone who has reached such a grand cult status as Zeldman himself without looking like a complete ass (which may be the case already). He has taught me many things over the years and it was because of him that I fell in love with liquid design.

If its possible to be in the "zone" on the web, then Dave Shea would be in it. I was brought to his site through others linking the CSS Zen Garden and have gone back daily ever since reading his insightful posts. The site is gorgeous, but its fixed. With my resolution I get all this pretty blue space on the right. Why Dave why?

Why have we as designers run away from the liquid design? I know it can be easier to just create something in the fixed resolution of our choice and be done with it, but is that always the best case? I have not been in this game as long as the rest of you so I am only wondering and questioning. This site uses percentages to flow with the resolution. To me the line length does not look bad in either 800x600 or 1600x1200, but I guess that is just me. Does anyone have any sites that they know of that exhibit beauty with liquid design? I need to find my place on the web because I am lost.

Whitespace: Design, Business, Web++

Liquid Design

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