Liquid Page Design

Just Say No --To Liquid Designs

You know those designs where the content column expands to fill the screen on your monitor - that’s called a fluid or liquid design. It’s easy to do with two and three column designs and some have only one column because the navigation is at the top of the page rather than on the left or right side.

To create one of these usually obnoxious designs, simply set the content column to 100 percent in width. If you have left and right columns it is usually easier to simply set them to a fixed width. You can do this using a table or a CSS design. Now that you know how - please don’t do it.

While a liquid design works well in theory, it falls apart in practice, at least for most content and most web sites.

Readability and scanning of a page is determined by the look and feel of that page. While a liquid layout may work well on small, low resolution monitors, it can cause problems on large (21-inch+), high resolution (1280+) monitors. Such things as line lengths, white space, line density, font size, etc. change the way viewers see a page.

Just because a page maintains its proportions when enlarged does not mean the usability of the page is maintained. Look at you favorite magazine or newspaper. Why do you think they use 2 to 4 inch columns? Because readers prefer the shorter line length and the article is easier to scan while reading.

Now, I would like to use the liquid design concept but only when there is good support for a minimum and maximum width. I will then be better able to limit the amount of change that occurs in my design regardless of the monitor size and settings used. Until then I will continue to use a fixed width design.

Jacob Neilsen suggests that people with large, high resolution monitors resize their browser so they can have multiple application in constant view, but from what I have seen, that is not the typical case.

A page design (print or web) is based on the appearance of the page and its line width. As a designer, I want to maintain page appearance control in the hopes of benefiting my viewers.