Our widescreen future (and present)

You'd think we'd have this figured out by now, but the ever-changing nature of the internet, computers, monitors, and design has made "How big of a screen should we design for?" a question at the start of every web design project.

The super quick answer to that has changed over the years, from 640x480 WAY back in the mid-90s to 800x600 to the current "safe" standard of 1024x768. Basically, subtract about 25 or so pixels from the width to cover the size of the scrollbar and you should be safe.

But, if you look at trends in monitor sizes -- and many clients do -- you'll notice that the widescreen monitor is becoming more and more prevalent. The screen I'm looking at right now is 1680x1050, and there are plenty of monitors out there with even wider resolution. W3Schools lists the % of people using screen resolutions of "higher" than 1024x768 at 38% as of January 2008 -- which is an increase from 26% the year before. A similar jump would put fully half of monitors at higher than 1024x768 by January 2009 (I think it's time for them to start breaking out that "or higher" group).

For the most part, however, virtually all sites have stopped themselves from designing for anything wider than 1024, even though statistics would suggest that you are serving up unused real estate to about half your visitors. Why not design for larger?

Well, there's a good reason -- as screen resolutions get larger, people are less inclined to maximize their browsers to full screen. But that starts to be a sort of chicken and the egg question -- are users not maximizing their browsers because of the "wasted" space, or is the way we use our computers shifting such that we prefer seeing multiple windows at once?

It would be interesting to see a site take full advantage of wider browser windows -- it is sometimes being done (look at Clear Left or this Particletree example and change the size of the browser window, and you'll see the content adapt), but I think a lot of heavily-trafficked commercial sites are missing out on an opportunity here. There may be a fundamental shift in the thinking behind site design in the not-too-distant future as our viewing area gets increasingly wider and (thus relatively) shorter.

Some additional interesthing thoughts on the subject are at 456 Berea Street.