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Given two seperate computers, how could one ensure that colours are being projected roughly the same on each screen?
IE, one screen might have 50% brightness more than another, so colours appear duller on one screen. One artist on one computer might be seeing the pictures differently to another, it's important they are seeing the same levels.
Is there some sort of callibration technique via software you can do? Any techniques? Or is a hardware solution the only way?
If you are talking about lab-critical calibration (that is, the colours on one monitor need to exactly match the colours on another, and both need to match an external reference as closely as possible) then a hardware colorimeter (with its own appropriate software and test targets) is the only solution. Software solutions can only get you so far.
The technique you described is a common software-only solution, but it's only for setting the gamma curves on a single device. There is no control over the absolute brightness and contrast; you are merely ensuring that solid colours match their dithered equivalents. That's usually done after setting the brightness and contrast so that black is as black as it can be and white is as white as it can be, but you can still distinguish not-quite-black from black and not-quite-white from white. Each monitor, then, will be optimized for its own maximum colour gamut, but it will not necessarily match any other monitor in the shop (even monitors that are the same make and model will show some variation due to manufacturing tolerances and age/use). A hardware colorimeter will (usually) generate a custom colour profile for the device under test as it is at the time of testing, and there is generally and end-to-end solution built into the product (so your scanner, printer, and monitor are all as closely matched as they can be).
You will never get to an absolute end-to-end match in a complete system, but hardware will get you as close as you can get. Software alone can only get you to a local maximum for the device it's calibrating, independent of any other device.
What you need to investigate are color profiles.
Wikipedia has some good articles on this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_management
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile
The basic thing you need is the color profile of the display on which the color was seen. Then, with the color profile of display #2, you can take the original color and convert it into a color that will look as close as possible (depends on what colors the display device can actually represent).
Color profiles are platform independent and many modern frameworks support them directly.
You may be interested in reading about how Apple has dealt with this issue:
Color Programming Topics
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/DrawColor/DrawColor.html
You'd have to allow or ask the individual users to calibrate their monitors. But there's enough variation across monitors - particularly between models and brands - that trying to implement a "silver bullet" solution is basically impossible.
As #Matt Ball observes calibrating your monitors is what you are trying to do. Here's one way to do it without specialised hardware or software. For 'roughly the same' visual calibration against a reference image is likely to be adequate.
Getting multiple monitors of varying quality/brand/capabilities to render a given image the same way is simply not possible.
IF you have complete control over the monitor, video card, calibration hardware/software, and lighting used then you have a shot. But that's only if you are in complete control of the desktop and the environment.
Assuming you are just accounting for LCDs, they are built different types of panels with a host of different capabilities. Brightness is just one factor (albeit a big one). Another is simply the number of colors they are capable of rendering.
Beyond that, there is the environment that the monitor is in. Even assuming the same brand monitor and calibration points, a person will perceive a different color if an overhead fluorescent is used versus an incandescent placed next to the monitor itself. At one place I was at we had to shut off all the overheads and provide exact lamp placement for the graphic artists. Picky picky. ;)
I assume that you have no control over the hardware used, each user has a different brand and model monitor.
You have also no control over operating system color profiles.
An extravagant solution would be to display a test picture or pattern, and ask your users to take a picture of it using their mobile or webcam.
Download the picture to the computer, and check whether its levels are valid or too out of range.
This will also ensure ambient light at the office is appropiate.
How do you choose your colour schemes for your applications and/or web designs?
Is it a gut instinct thing or can logic be applied here too? I have looked at some colour theory but my combinations seemed wrong.
I am looking at a monochrome webpage. Rather than pluck colours out of the air as usual I would like to see if there is a science behind this. Links and opinions welcome.
Kuler is a great utility for choosing color schemes that work in harmony.
I have someone else who lives and breathes color and design do it for me.
Most graphic designers make terrible programmers, and most programmers make terrible graphic designers. So I dodge the issue entirely.
To be totally honest, I usually rip off someone elses color scheme for my own personal stuff (for work stuff, hire a designer). I will grab the main color and complimentary color from a site I think looks nice, plug those into one of the hundreds of online color tools out there, and build out a pallet. Once I have the colors down, I will do a few subtle gradients in photoshop, and just sort of go from there.
Colourlovers: http://www.colourlovers.com/
Or just look around. Go around your town with a camera, take random pictures and pick colours. Good places are the fruit section of a market, park, etc.
Use the system defaults for applications. That's where the user sets THEIR preference, which you should honor.
It is a science and an art, and a big one. 61,000,000 results on google for "color design".
You might also be interested in:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Graphic_design
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_theory
Usually I'm told what to use.
If I'm not and have a logo or an image and use this Colors Palette Generator it lets you upload an image and then gives you a generated colour scheme.
If nether I borrow something from around the web.
I bought a designers/printers reference book that contains pre-defined sets of colours and tones. It includes the RGB values for the colours so I can put them directly into my apps.
The book contains sets such as "contemporary", "autumn", "winter", "cool modern".
Your public library should have a copy of the book Color Index which contains various color combinations which work harmoniously. Also, you could look into purchasing a Color Wheel from your local art supply store. It's not expensive, it lets you play with mono, complementary, triad and tetrad schemes. The Color Scheme Designer site is also very nice.
Another alternative is colorcombos.com, which can grab colors from any website. You can browse its library for different combinations or try to change them, then make yours.
I'm currently designing my first ever GUI for Windows. I'm using MFC and Visual Studio 2008. The monitor I have been designing my program on has 1680x1050 native resolution. If I compile and send my program to one of my coworkers to run on their computer (generally a laptop running at 1024x768), my program will not fit on their screen.
I have been trying to read up on how to design an MFC application so that it will run on all resolutions, but I keep finding misleading information. Everywhere I look it seems that DLUs are supposed to resize your application for you, and that the only time you should run into problems is when you have an actual bitmap whose resolution you need to worry about. But if this is the case, why will my program no longer fit on my screen when I set my monitor to a lower resolution? Instead of my program "shrinking" to take up the same amount of screen real estate that it uses at 1680x1050, it gets huge and grainy.
The "obvious" solution here is to set my resolution to 1024x768 and redesign my program to fit on the screen. Except that I've already squished everything on my dialogs as much as possible to try and get my program to fit on screen running at 1024x768. My dialog fonts are set to Microsoft Sans Serif 8 but still appear huge (much larger than 8 points) when running at 1024x768.
I know there HAS to be a way to make my program keep the same scaling... right? Or is this the wrong way to approach the problem? What is the correct/standard way to go about designing an MFC program so that it can run on many resolutions, say 800x600 and up?
I assume your application GUI is dialog based (the main window is a dialog)?
In that case you have a problem, because, as you discovered, MFC has no support for resizing a dialog correctly. Your options are:
Redesign your GUI to use a SDI or MDI GUI.
Use a dialog resize extension. There are many available, for some very good suggestions see this question. Another options are this one and this one.
Don't use MFC. wxWidgets has much better support for dialog resizing.
MFC is only a thin wrapper over the Windows API. They both make an assumption which is hardly ever true: if you have a higher resolution screen, you'll adjust the DPI or font size in Windows to get larger characters. Most of the time, a larger screen size means a larger physical monitor, or a laptop where you want to squeeze as much information into a small screen as possible; people value more information over greater detail. Thus the assumption fails.
If you can't squeeze your entire UI into the smallest size screen you need to support, you'll have to find another way to make it smaller. Without knowing anything about your UI, I might suggest using tabs to group the controls into pages.
I've had good luck making my windows resizable, so that people with larger screens can see more information at once. You need to do this the hard way, responding to the WM_SIZE message to the window and deciding which controls should be made larger and which ones should just move.
There is no automatic way to resize the content of your dialogs when resolution changes. So, you need to set some boundaries.
Option 1.
If you are developing your app for customers, pick one minimum resolution (like 1024x7678), redesign you dialogs so that everything fits. Maybe break up some into several, or use tab strip control.
Option 2.
Create separate dialog forms for each resolution you'd like to support, but use the same class to handle it. At runtime detect resolution and use the appropriate form.
Option 3.
Write your own resizing functionality, so that user could adjust the size of your dialogs to his liking.
I especially hear it from those advocates of "business" notebooks manufactured by IBM/Lenovo, HP, Dell (maybe) that "business users do not need quality screens". They stick in the worst possible LCDs out there (even if with a high resolution) and dare to sell that crap. You can't even distinguish hue variations like light-yellow vs. light-grey.
I really miss it - do all of you agree color reproduction of a developer display is irrelevant, be it even a grayscale display it will do?
I understand most of developers work with text but... at times there is some design work to be done which is not doable on cheap LCDs.
And besides - wouldn't you enjoy fresh saturated colors even in a development environment? Bright cheerful icons on menus? Isn't it better to sit in a sunny office with green trees and flowers out of the window than in a garage with dark colors and weak artificial lighting?
P.S. Inspired by the topic about keyboards: Keyboard for programmers
The question about displays and developers really interests me since a very long time.
Even though I don't need a high quality screen, I appreciate the difference, and like esnoeijs said, an occasion will arise where I'll need to critique some graphic design work where the quality monitor will make a difference.
I think, "developer" is too broad to give a precise answer.
If you are a code-crafter of programs reading text emitting text, without the need to make some colors look nice, then yes, then you really can go with a monochrome screen. you need black as a background, white as the foreground and some reversing to highlight matching braces. In this particular case, I would value high resolutions far far more important than colors, since usually it is about seeing more code (and especially, more things about and around the current piece of code, like documentation, tests, a quick interpreter loop, some research paper, you name it).
If you are a developer just learning a language and if you have an editor with syntax highlighting, then color is a massive, massive usability leap. I would not want to miss the ability to display keywords in a bright pink, strings in a brigt cyan and similar things (all on a black background)
If you are a frontend-designer, then it is a completely different story. If you are a frontend designer, you will need a high quality display with good color display abilities. You do not need the best one possible, but your display should at least be able to display the colors your regular user will use, so you will not put in green, because you wanted blue and your users see yellow (or other nonsenses).
if you use tools that require the use of colors in order to encode information, color is crucial, because you might be unable to see the additional information.
...
So, I think, most programmers do not need some ridiculous color displaying abilities, even though, most of the time, a good solid color display is helpful, because they need to work on some frontend or because they want to learn some language.
HTH,
Tetha
Better quality color monitors can come in handy in a lot of ways. The first way that comes to mind is if you are using a code development tool that has the capability of highlighting keywords such as Zend does.
I once spent half a day trying to add zebra striping to a table in my company's webapp that already had it because both my screen and QA's screen were unable to display the different colors of the zebra stripes (they rendered as the same color). Likewise, I once had my boss ask me to change the color of part of an icon, and to me it made the icon look like a uniform blue, but on his much better monitor, you could clearly see both shades of blue and it looked really nice... it was hard to make that edit without being able to see what I was doing.
I guess the developers in my company end up doing some design work in addition to real dev. I do spend most of my time in the shell though, so aside from the constant flickering that gives me headaches (yes, it's an LCD), a low-qual monitor is OK.
I'm a developer but being in webdev land i've picked up enough design stuff to be critical about it, so i mostly try to get samsung screens with a good colour range.
With a good monitor, you can adjust it to your likings.
Personally, I have a $700-Fujitsu Siemens monitor bought in (afaik) 2000, and a $340-BenQ bought in 2005, and I prefer coding on the first monitor, as I don't have to crank up the brightness (reducing headaches) and can still see everything I want to see (subpixelhinted 6 point fonts, subtle variations in syntax highlightings etc.).
At least one author would disagree. He ranked color accuracy on four notebooks:
Lenovo ThinkPad W700
IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad T60
Dell Inspiron Mini 9
Apple late-2008 MacBook Pro 15 inch
I'm less picky about the actual monitor I have and more picky that I have two monitors that are exactly the same model and use the same video connector.
As a web developer, it can be frustrating to have colors that don't match because one of your monitors is VGA and the other is DVI.
Possibly the sort of "business user" who works on invoices all day does not need a very good display, but anyone who works on anything whose appearance counts, from software developers to business users who need to make Powerpoint presentations, does.
If you are a hardcore terminal+vim user like me, they color quality and fidelity are almost irrelevant, except for the quality of blue (which I use in some situations, like directory names) which tends to be too faint to be seen on my black background. Nothing that cannot be fixed with some tinkering though, but I am used to blue.
That said, I actually have a couple of things to say about the new screen on the macbook unibody. The glossy finish is a real pain. So annoying. And the color fidelity is very low. I spent an evening trying to understand why on a gradient from light green to white I had a pinkish stripe. Turns out that the pink is an artifact of the macbook screen. Another screen does not show the issue. On the plus side, the LED backlight is very powerful and nice, making the colors very vibrant.
This to say that color fidelity is fundamental if you use color-intensive stuff like eclipse (which communicates a lot also through different shades of colors), and of course for web frontend development. If you just need a terminal and a vim running, I don't think color fidelity makes a real difference, once you have a comfortable setup with low reflections, and a good contrast.
(note: it's been a few years since I've shopped for a monitor. this may be out of date)
I find it interesting that nobody has really defined "quality" yet, other than to say more vibrant colors. Generally, LCD panels fall into one of two tracks:
Good color/image reproduction (S-IPS panels and similar)
Good response time ( TN panels )
I consider SIPS and similar panels a must for development for one crucial reason: look angle. The image doesn't change colors or do other weird things as you angle to the screen changes. Very important for collaboration.
At the high end of this scale are monitors that are designed to perform will with color calibration. Most developers won't need anything this fancy.
TN panels are decent for gaming, movies, and other things featuring fast motion. They are optimized for pixel response time, and it's usually the main feature touted for these panels. Many cheaper panels are going to be of this variety.
In a monitor, I look for four things:
panel type (S-IPS or similar)
brightness (no more than 300cd/m2)
dot pitch (for good text, go with a small dot pitch: 0.27 is too big)
good contrast/ light leakage/ etc. (how black is black, and how uniform)
Although I love S-IPS panels, I must admit that any LCD monitor that can meet criteria 2-4 above would be a good choice, even if it's a cheaper TN panel.
It depends what you're doing.
If you're dealing processing images, yes, a good "quality" monitor is important.. but equally (or more) important to have it set-up correctly and calibrated.
If you're doing web-design, having a decent monitor is important, but again only if it's setup correctly (contrast/brightness/colour-balance).
If you're just "writing code", having a monitor your eyes like is important, the colour replication isn't important. A monochrome monitor might be stretching it, syntax-highlighting is nice, but even vim and it's 16 colours is "enough"
The term quality is also a bit "it depends" also.. CRT's have far better colour replication than TFT's, but I wouldn't recommend them (I always found reading text on them difficult, and they are hard to find, bulky and generally deprecated now).
For web-design, pretty much any monitor will be fine as long as it's not a 10 year old CRT with a broken red cathode-tube.. Again, as long as it's set-up correctly, most monitors are capable of displaying colour "good enough"
For "writing code", I think size/resolution/number-of-screens is more important than colour replication, as shown by most answers to any of these questions
Update:
I deleted my motivation because it seems to distract readers. This is not about "why don't you make your window smaller". See the screenshots and you will see obstructed text because of fixed width. See my reference to "em/ex" notation in CSS. I would like to have a real discussion here. Thank you.
Now I would like to ask real experts on this topic -- I'm not a web designer -- why fixed width layout are still that popular and if there are really good reasons for it. (you are welcome to point out reasons against it as well.)
Is it too hard to design your layout relatively (from start on)? It seems some people even forgot how to do it.
Do you have real reasons like readability and just don't know how to deal with it correctly? Here I'm referring to pieces of wisdom, like it's harder to read longer lines (that's why newspapers use columns) -- but then, width should be given using em and ex.
Are you forced by some old guidelines? In the dark old age of HTML, people did a lot of things wrong; now everybody finally uses CSS, but perhaps this one just sticked.
Or are you like me, wondering why everybody is doing it "wrong"?
To illustrate the issue, I want to give screenshots of negative examples first:
StackOverflow (here I can't even see what would make it any hard to fix it)
Filmstarts (a german website which renders itself unreadable-if I don't take a reading-glass with me)
And here is a positive example. It looks like a typical fixed with site (even with transparent borders), but it is not:
Website on Wiki software -- associated Forums
What do you think?
Update: Related questions: this one and that one.
And here, as expected, comes the usual canard: “long lines are too hard to read”.
[Citation needed], folks.
See http://webusability.com/article_line_length_12_2002.htm for a summary of actual research in this area. A number of these, plus http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/72/LineLength.asp, find that although users express a preference for moderate line lengths, reading speeds do not sharply drop off with ‘long’ lines; in fact many show increased speeds with the longer settings.
As long as it's not ridiculously long, and taking care to use a decent amount of leading, long lines are not generally a real issue at today's typical browser widths and default font sizes. (If you're one of those designers that loves to use teeny-tiny type for everything, it could be an issue, but then you're already making it impossible to read with the flyspeck text. Stop it!)
So as it's only an option of user preference that prefers medium-short lines, let us users decide how much screen space we want to give the web site to get our work done. We're the ones best-equipped to know. If you decide you know definitively best you're likely to waste space, or, if you guessed too long, make us scroll back and forth sideways to read the text — and that really is a readability nightmare.
If you want to protect us from ourselves, you can compromise by specifying a min-width and max-width in ‘em’ units so that the page is responsive to liquid layout, but doesn't get stretched to extremes.
But otherwise, the best reason to design fixed-width is indeed that it is easier, especially for someone with a fixed-2D-grid view of the world and static visual-design tools like Photoshop.
It's already a pain to make a website that renders correctly across all popular browsers; if you also want it to render correctly at all text sizes, it's quite a lot of work. A lot of web developers design their sites for the default font size and try to support fonts that are either a little bit larger or a little bit smaller. (You might be interested in this dated but relevant piece from Jakob Nielsen.)
As for fixed-width sites, it's hard to say. Personally, I suspect that a lot of web designers just like to feel like they have a lot of control over their look and feel, and think the site looks "ugly" when you stretch it too far, so they don't let you do it. Probably not wise, but there you go.
Now I would like to ask real experts
on this topic -- I'm not a web
designer -- why fixed width layout are
still that popular and if there are
really good reasons for it.
Ah, both subjective and argumentative. I'm sure my argument won't convince you, but here's one really good reason, IMHO:
Presentation.
Just like a movie, the director has an experience in mind for the viewer. They frame the movie just so. They move the action at a given pace for the emotion they are trying to invoke in the viewer. Even though DVDs have had the "angle" feature since inception, few movies have ever given viewers the opportunity to watch the film from a different point of view, and if they have that viewpoint was still under the control of the director.
Now, any old sap can throw up a website, and for the most part they aren't interested in anything more than the content.
But real designers fully understand that the design must be understood as a whole. A wide layout has a very different impact on people than a multicolumn or thin layout. Reader eyes move in a certain pattern, and the text is intended to pull the reader along a path.
Those who claim that every layout should have certain features are shortsighted. There are no universally true 'rules', and trying to make an expanding layout a rule is shortsighted at best, and arrogant at worst.
-Adam
Here are my $0.02 and they are worth exactly what you paid for them (and if that's not a perfect example of the current economic situation... :-))
The layout of a website should be dictated by the overall user experience. This is in part determined by the accessibility, in part by the design, in part by the functionality:
Accessibility - as several people pointed out, letting the website use the full width of the browser without any control can result in quite a long lines that make it hard to read[1]. Making the text automatically layout in multiple columns is a potential answer to this problem, but it's really hard to achieve with CSS (that's gotta be the worst tool for doing layout humanity ever devised, but that's a separate topic) and is fraught with other issues as well.
I should note that you do have a point - most websites with fixed width do suck on high-DPI because they don't take into account the changed font size. However, that's not an inherent problem of the fixed width design; I've seen it with fluid designs as well.
[1] No, I don't have a citation. I, however, have tried reading on full-screen on my 24" 1920x1200 96dpi [2] and gotta tell you - after 15 minutes my neck is cramping from the constant turning of my head.
[2] The typical user still runs 1024x768 or 1280x1024 (based on instrumentation from the product I work on, with about little bit less than 10mln installs for the latest version). So yeah, I am not the typical user.
Design - most modern designs are very rich on graphical and video elements. Most graphical elements do not scale well with the document reflow and video does not scale at all. (I would again blame this on CSS - it's support for dynamic resizing of images is lacking some basic operations and there is aboslutely no support for building and control of the visual tree. But I digress again :-)) As such, disegners opt in for the easier approach.
Functionality - fluid layout is really good for dealing with big text chunks like documents. However, quite a few modern websites are in effect applications, not documents. They have multiple elements and controls and increasing the area on which these elements are scatered makes it harder for the user to keep all of them in focus.
Couple examples:
two control groups that are aligned at the left and the right end will be too far away from each other in full-screen width. Note: that can be alleviated by choosing to always keep all the controls grouped together, like most desktop applications do (almost all desktop apps keep all toolbars left-aligned).
a picture/video and associated text below it. On full screen there are two possible approaches for fluid layout:
a) scale the picture to the full width, at which point the text is visually lost
b) leave the picture the same width, but let the text flow the full width, at which point the picture is visually lost.
I guess my point is that the fluid layout is not the Holy Grail of all layouts and there are scenarios where it's not applicable. The designer and the developer of the webapp should choose the appropriate layout and implement it so that it meets the needs of the target users, delivers the best experience of the product functionality and adapts to the user environment.
I suspect that most web developers go for fixed width because it's by far easier to develop such a site (in addition, many Content Management Systems only offer a fixed-width layout).
Getting a dynamic layout to work well & correctly in different browsers is more tricky - but it is definity doable (I'm just recently working on that issue ;-).
And I do agree with you - I want web pages that dynamically adjust their contents to the browser size that I as the 'customer' like to work with (whether that's small or large). I don't like to be patronized into "not using my browser in full-screen mode" or anything the like...
You might try zooming in. Most modern browsers will zoom the whole page by default, not just the text. This preserves the page layout and uses more of your screen. Usually the shortcut is ctrl + + and ctrl + -. It works well on my laptop, at least
[Forget my mention of the windowmanagement, it wasnt on topic]
I currently run a big internet-community and we'll switch to fixed-width (for 1024px) design asap because we only get problems currently using a dynamic-width-layout: You cant rely on anything, and (the biggest problem imho) text gets to long, so there are only a few lines but the lines themself are much to long to overview.
Readability and Predictability
You need to know how things will be displayed to be sure it will be readable and pleasant to the eyes. By using a fixed width, you know exactly (almost exactly because of cross-browser support) what your users will see.
However fixed-width designs would be a thing from the past if browsers could support correctly exactly 2 CSS properties:
min-width
max-width
That would allow designers to design web sites that would be flexible and predictable. No more surprises and users can use whatever resolution they want.
In my experience, it is for two reasons:
1) Speed - it is generally faster to write a web page in fixed with, rather than trying to write one that resizes correctly at more than a small number of resolutions.
2) The designer of the web site isn't the ultimate approver of what goes into production - if you try to work with a flow instead of fixed layout you get questions about why it looks different on Sallys' PC vs the Big bosses, and why can't you move this over to here, etc, which are easier to fix by moving to a fixed layout.
Tabbed Browsers
Since I use a tabbed browser for day to day use, resizing my window every time I switch tabs is actually a bit of a hassle. I have the window set to the maximum usable width for my purposes, and to accommodate the "largest" tab that is open. For the remaining tabs, having fluid layouts is actually kind of annoying and distracting. Items and text jump around and change position depending on how I may have resized my window for another tab. Also, fluid layouts result in uncomfortably wide blocks of short (vertically) text.
For me, it's a lot easier as a reader to keep my eyes tracking properly on narrower blocks of text with lots of vertical scroll, and it's much easier when sites I'm familiar with stay the same size so that the layout and positioning is predictable, regardless of what I've done to my window to accommodate other tabs. I actually used to be a big fan of fluid layouts, but I find more and more that I prefer fixed layouts now that I use a tabbed browser.
I think the question shouldn't be "Why would you choose a fixed-width design?" it should be "why wouldn't you?"
Firstly, you need to cater for the lowest-common denominator. Many developers will be running on screens with resolutions like 1680x1050, 1920x1200 and 1280x1024. Some users will be using 1024x768, which I personally consider the lowest resolution you need to cater for (thank God it's not 800x600 anymore). If you fix the width to 960-1000 pixels then you don't run the problem of developers unintentionally making pages that can't be viewed without scrolling on a monitor with less than 1600 pixels (wide). Believe me it happens.
Layout on any non-trivial Webpage is hard. Throw in cross-browser support such that your page not only works but looks reasonably consistent and it's a huge problem. Now try to throw in variable width and it just gets that much worse if not impossible. Look at the payoff too: who is it going to benefit? A small minority of users that have high resolutions and actually want to stretch that content across the entire screen. I have a widescreen monitor and I won't maximize my browser for instance. Many people are like me in this respect.
Consider another problem: CSS. CSS s good for many things but is a royal pain in many others. For one thing. Now browser box model differences aside, there are still many quirks with how different browsers handle CSS and even if there weren't there are many trivial things CSS can't do and the only workaround is to do things by pixel.
As a concrete example, I'm doing some tables at the moment that are bursting at the seams. I'm reloading the contents with an Ajax call and replacing the contents. Now I at first tried to fix the widths of the columns with percentages. Doing it this way would be a prerequisite for not fixing the width. Firefox treated those as a suggestion and would resize them anyway even when it arguably didn't have to. I didn't get satisfactory results until I fixed the widths in pixels.
At the end of the day no website really cares if it stretches across 1600 pixels or not. That's what it comes down to.
I've worked with a lot of artists. They design a layout to be pleasing and clear. They want the presentation to match what they designed. Artist-driven design leads to fixed-width. For brochure sites, fixed width makes a lot of sense.
For sites with rapidly-changing content (news or shopping, or most anything driven by a CMS), I much prefer fluid, full-screen designs.
One of the biggest concerns that fixing the width of a website solves is readability. If you let a site be arbitrarily wide and have a block of text using that entire width, it becomes very difficult for people to read. If you make the font size bigger to compensate, then you destroy the experience for people with smaller screens.
On the other hand, if your content is visual or modular and you can make it fill up the page more intelligently, you might have a case for a totally fluid layout.
But I agree with the others who question why you would maximize a browser on such a big display. Why not make your browser window smaller? You'll be more productive and you'll stop worrying about it at the same time.
Many browsers do a better job of scaling websites to be larger than they used to; Firefox 3, at least, grows the entire page when you zoom in, not breaking the layout.
If you want it to take up more screen real estate, use a lower resolution. This can be useful if you're displaying a website on a large monitor up on a wall for public view. Otherwise, take #theomega's advice and use the rest of your screen for other windows.
As for a little (of the very little) of what I know about web design and fixed width sites:
They tend to make good use of white space and draw your focus down the page. Cluttering up the page by cramming every last corner with content is what designers call "visual intimidation." It's difficult to figure out what's important versus what's not.
They feel more "finished", like a picture in a frame instead of like a photo print thumb-tacked up on a cork board.
"It has a resolution of 1920x1200, so all fixed-width sites waste space
The form factor is only 15". So I have to use larger fonts and the text won't fit into these crammed layouts any more, sometimes even getting obstructed by other elements."
There is a good reason for that. If the paragraph are stretched too wide, it gets more difficult to read. Humans need a "break" after about 15 to 20 words and that is EXACTLY why we don't have books that are very wide.
The higher resolution allows you to have MORE details BUT it also depends on HOW you use the space. I never maximize the browser and PC's are built for window multitasking, not ONE window at a time.
The whole point of being able to adjust the size of your browser window is to better see the content of a web page, in the way that suits your situation. If the page isn't going to adjust, why not just make browser windows a single, fixed size?
If I have a big monitor, I want to be able to stretch my window out and have the content correctly fill it. If I need space for another window, I want to be able to shrink my browser window down and have the content correctly adjust by changing the layout (until a certain minimum point, and then by switching to a scroll bar, of course.)
Fixed width layouts are perfectly acceptable.
Fluid layouts are nice, but are more difficult to implement, especially if there are more than two columns and source div order is important.
Line length is an issue regarding readability, but this interacts with font size. So you have to balance width against likely font sizes on screen.
Nowadays, it's reasonable to assume that 1024 x 768 and up is the vast majority of the desktop user market, so you can safely design for 960 px fixed width -- for screen media type.
A couple of important constraints:
ensure is that horizontal scrolling
is never required by the user
if conversions are an issue, make sure
that clickable things -- particularly
"calls to action" or anything than
makes your cash register go
"ka-ching" should not fall to the
right of the 770th pixel or so --
just in case.
But another consideration is handheld media. You should provide alternate CSS for handheld media type. Many of these screens are under 400 px wide.
Delivering a site that looks good and functions on a wide variety browsers, devices, display widths and viewport sizes is a moving target and continuous challenge.
As regards the filmstarts.de site, it is definitely a mess, but the problem is not that it is a fixed width layout, but rather with how the layout is designed and implemented. There are good and bad implementations of fixed width layouts, just like there are good and bad implementations of fluid layouts, or semi-fluid layouts with fixed width elements, etc.
I put it down to laziness. Fixed width layouts are simply easier to design and make look nice because you do not need to worry about the size changing. This, for example, makes it really easy to add images, since you know what size the layout will be.
Personally, fixed-width websites really irritate me. I like to use large monitors. I paid a lot of money for them, so I'd like to make use to make use of them instead of having most of it be left blank. This is made even worse by sites which refuse to get larger if I increase the font size. I don't have the best eyesight and often use larger fonts to read text on websites and nothing is worse than a fixed-width layout leaving me with three words per line and a mostly blank screen...
As far as I'm aware while all the reasons cited are valid, the primary reason is that a lot of machines in monolithic institutions like banks and government orgs are still on fixed and somewhat archaic low resolutions. It's just the lowest common denominator sadly.
I personally like fixed width sites better. I am not forced to mess with my browser window to get a line size I can deal with. I personally find very long lines very hard to read. I also just think it looks better although that is 100% completely subjective.
I have designed and worked with both. Some aspects of variable width sites make displaying data easier. The only problem I have had with them is due to right aligned navigation which was a little messy when it could move based on the user's browser setting.
My final answer - both are fine and each have their place.
I just came across this site, which actually has a link in the top right corner that lets you switch between fixed and fluid.
http://developer.spikesource.com/wiki/index.php/Home
A major point for using fixed width is that the designer can actually control the way the webpage looks irrespective of browser environment. I see two reasons to use FW:
The designer wants the webpage to look all the same.
The designer lacks time/wish/... to test their page in different modes and in different browsers, and just avoids the risk of webpage layot starting flying around.
I didn't make fixed-size layout until I switched to a 32 inches monitor. It is very hard to read the text if the lines goes over 32 inches. I've learned appreciate text that do not span over more than 1,000 pixels, and I have switched to fixed layout since.
But I agree that reducing the content width to < 800px is a pain when you have a big monitor.
Most users lack understanding of how to use a browser properly. When the day come such that users actually know how to use a computer then you will understand that fluid width is the obvious choice for web sites.
I am frequently forced too. None of the 3 developers here has a strong background in design, and the dictated rules and implementations we strive for reflects this. It is an area I want to improve in.
Liquid layout using % as unit can adapt to any screen.
Some layouts must use fixed column design. If there's table or image in the column, you have to use fixed column, or the table or image will break the column in liquid design.
In grid layouts with heights of the grid normally fixed, it's better using fixed column or the widths may got uneven.
It's upto the content of webpage to use elastic column or fixed column layout.
Long lines of text can be difficult to read. For the website I work on we limit the width for usability and readability. We have also designed our site to scale well using CTRL-+ to zoom.