Text column width w/ liquid web design?

[DJFuji]

Just wondering what other web design people think of using liquid design and having to deal with 1600x1200+ monitors that make text span across the whole screen. Popular wisdom in print design says that text should never span more than 4" wide in a column. Too hard to read.

I tend to use liquid design on most of my sites because i like being able to take advantage of the whole screen. Unfortunately, though, liquid design states that text will expand to fit the user's screen, meaning you have HUGE blocks of text that's hard to read. How do you guys work around this? Just design for 800x600 or 1024x768 and hope that people using 1600x1200 have good eyes? Or is there some trick to making text split into multiple columns under higher resolutions? I guess you could do this with js...

Opinions?

 

[kt]

Most designer will do their web graphic design for 800x600 resolution. Not everyone will afford the hardware that will support 1600x1200 resolutions.

 

[DJFuji]

That's static design. I'm talking about liquid design that spans from 800x600 to an unlimited resolution. Like anandtech forums, for example.

 

[Spoooon]

Originally posted by: DJ Fuji
That's static design. I'm talking about liquid design that spans from 800x600 to an unlimited resolution. Like anandtech forums, for example.

Can you think of an example that looks poor at high resolutions? Granted, I'm not at 1600x1200, but I don't have any problems with reading the text here. I'm at 1400x1050.

 

[DJFuji]

i'm running at 1600x1200 and it actually IS hard to read a page that has a large amount of text going from one side of the screen to the next in one giant column. Your eyes loose track of where you're reading. Kind of like reading a printed word document in font size 8 and single spaced. Even these forums can get hard to read if someone posts a huge paragraph of text. Good liquid web design almost never "looks" bad, it's just not ideal for large amounts of text. That's why print design dictates that >4" of text column width is bad.

 

[jonmullen]

I guess you could use javascript to load different stylesheets based on the window size

 

[Ness]

Originally posted by: kt
Most designer will do their web graphic design for 800x600 resolution. Not everyone will afford the hardware that will support 1600x1200 resolutions.

It's almost the norm to design for 1024x768 now as a minimum. The only reason it isn't is that windows defaults to 800x600, and many people are too stupid to change it. That makes me sad 🙁 It's like telling the late Bob Ross that his huge canvas for the day is being replaced with one the size of a pop-tart.

 

[DurocShark]

I would still lock down the text width. You can have columns next to each other to fill the screen.

 

[Huma]

What I did on our company site is have constricted fluid width. So the page could contract to fit an 800x600 screen, but it would also expand out to fill a 1024x area before stopping so it wouldn't go 1600x wide. The maximum can be adjusted in code.

see (and play with) www.blastradius.com