I’m leaving on Friday to spend ten days in Alabama on a farm with my fat family and their southern fried everything. When I return, I will weigh 500 lbs and we shall drink car bombs and speak as men do. Stick that in your blackberry.

MT – The Birthday Bash Trio Celebration (BBTC) is on! It will be during this time that our foray against one another with weapons of alcoholic liquids shall commence. When? Not sure. Where? Only the gods know the answer to that one. But get ready buddy…I’ve been laid up for a few weeks so I’ve gotten my weight up, its go time!

It’s too bad that we don’t have better resizing code in the browser.

As for stats: can Mint tell you what the width of the user’s browser window was? I know I never browse full screen…

The max-width issue is really one of personal preference. While it would prevent horizontal scrolling from being an issue, it would also break the layout at very large sizes—the very thing I was going for.

I’m sure there’s plenty of designers and usability experts who would disagree with me here, but as pixel density continue to rise with the introduction of new hardware, those still stuck using anything less than 1024×768 are going to have to join their 640×480-lovin’ peers in accepting horizontal scrolling as a fact of life.

http://sonspring.com/journal/em-image-sizing

The last em-based design I tried bombed out under protests from one of our leaders that she couldn’t find the navigation. She was running 800×600 with her fonts scaled way up.

The way around this (and what I’d recommend to add to this site) is to add a max-width to the wrapper div. (of the content & side/navbar)

I ended up switching back to pixels just so that she could see the whole page, even if it did look a little screwy.

This is pretty much what it’s all about for me. Because I know substantially less about this than a great number of people (a fact which I readily admit), like a child emulating his father, I watch what they do and see how they handle a situation I’m trying to figure out.

There’s a designer who I really think is fantastic. His personal site is fluid, and with a 1440×900 display, I keep my browser windows fairly wide. The measure of his article text usually seems a bit too long, but when sized up in Safari, it’s absolutely gorgeous. No matter how big you make the text, it sings.

This same designer created a fixed-width layout that looks sublime. When fonts are sized up substantially, on this site you end up with 4–6 words per line, making the rhythm of articles read not unlike Hop on Pop.

So what’s my point? That each method—fixed, liquid, and elastic—has flaws. With each project and the audience it brings, the designer and client have to decide which drawbacks they are willing to live with.

That is to say that I have no idea, I know nothing, and purely chose an elastic layout because it seemed right for me, as a designer who loves working with type. The sites I design in my day job, which are primarily for schools, are generally designed with the assumption that readability, at all costs, is the number one priority.