Higher resolutions, narrower browser windows fit rise of Vertical Point Media
The mainstreaming of wider screen monitors, with higher resolutions, seemed to herald the long awaited departure from narrow site widths - the bane of site designers everywhere.
To bad all those pixels are not necessarily what they seem.
Up to a certain point most of us would use all of our horizontal screen real estate for the browser window when visiting sites. At some point, possibly around the 1280x mark, this trend regressed. Instead of using all that lovely width for one app - the browser - we found that we could run a second app window next to Firefox/IE/Safari.
With many of us in the biz, and an increasing number of audience members, working off of even higher resolution screens (my 23″ display gives me a lovely 1920x) the browser window keeps getting narrower and narrower as more and more apps share the horizontal space.
At the same time as this stage of the screen evolution has been making a mark in the mainstream, over the past 4-5 years, we have also seen a simultaneous rise in what I call Vertical Point Media.
In short Vertical Point Media (VPM) refers to sites and apps that display information vertically as a matter of preference, function and/or usability. Blogs being the most apparent ones. This becomes even clearer when you think of them in the Tumblr incarnation. Add to this Twitter and Jaiku and you see a pattern. Throw in feed readers, whose only horizontal requirements are associated with normal line width legibility, and Vertical Point Media is a fact.
To top it all off, consider another hardware feature that has made VPM possible - the non-click scroll pad on laptops, suplemented by its touch screen friend as seen on the iPhone etc.
Does this mean that we can no longer build sites wider than 1000 pixels? Firstly, I don’t think we often need to go much wider. With dynamic site widths etc. we can also easily accommodate a wider range of screens resolutions and browser window widths without pushing past the 1K mark.
Secondly, we should instead ask how we can work with the change in how an increasing number of people choose to view web pages: narrower browser windows on higher res screens showing vertically more of a site. That’s the real, and fun, challenge.
