Wide is the New Pink

I’ve been involved in web design for more than 9 years now (hard to believe it’s been that long). In my high school days, into college, and well beyond, I’ve had a keen eye for design. Part of that obsession has generally required that I have a high-resolution screen in front of me at all times - I can’t stand low-res.. it’s too inefficient for my needs (try managing your Illustrator palettes at 640 x 480 and get back to me).

When I first started, 640 x 480 was the max you could go for. Of course, it was really more like 600 x 390 or something when all the button bars were turned off. I can remember fondly the day we decided to start designing for 800 x 600. It was “cutting edge” as they say. It’s hard describe what it’s like to get that extra breathing room.

It’s many years later now and we’ve moved to even higher resolutions, though, largely, our expectations haven’t changed as much. Or so I thought. We’ve been working on the new version of the x:posted site and we realized that we were seeing more and more 1024 x 768 sites. We even saw some that were even wider!

Yesterday, the NY Times released a new version of the site as well. Guess what? It’s wide.

Are we finally past the point that 1024 is the norm? It’s possible, but I’m sticking to old faithful for a little while longer.