I’m lov­ing the addi­tional screen space that 22″ LCD mon­i­tor affords me. So much more than what I had with the old 19″ CRT.

It’s just a shame that most web­site designs haven’t pro­gressed to a point where there isn’t a large amount of empty space left around the con­tent. I’ve got a screen that stretches from one side of the room and it just isn’t being used to it’s poten­tial. I’ve even taken to resiz­ing the browser win­dow to mimic the 1024x768 ratio. Just so I don’t get snow blindness.

The hastily put together GIF below shows just how much extra space there is on my mon­i­tor run­ning at 1680x1050 (red), com­pared to the aver­age 1024x768 (blue) res­o­lu­tion:

A web­site that pushes up against the edges of a stan­dard sized mon­i­tor only takes up roughly 60% of my widescreen mon­ster. Those bloggy web­site designs with cen­tered con­tent columns aren’t help­ing. 9 times out of 10 they have even more empty space flow­ing off the left and right mar­gins. My site being a prime exam­ple of this.

So where are the web­sites for the husky monitor?

I am happy to report that there’s been a few suc­cess­ful attempts at this. Web Designer Wall has a great gallery of sites that chose to stretch to the lim­its. Of course if you’re not read­ing this on a widescreen mon­i­tor you won’t enjoy them on as many lev­els as me.

My next chal­lenge (well after Post a Day Month and pos­si­bly after the next Col­labowrite story) is to design a site that will stretch to fill my mon­i­tor, but still look just fine in your puny screens.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 4:54 pm and is filed under life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.