April 17th, 2005 | 2 Comments

Fluid vs. Fixed. vs. CSS Zen Garden

This morning, I was alerted to the fact that the CSS Zen Garden has released 6 new designs, which was greeted with the usual ‘frisson‘ of excitement I get in the hope of viewing some design inspiration. Although the designs meet the usual Zen Garden high standards (see ‘Chien‘ in particular, featuring Scooby Doo), what struck me most was the uniformity of the layout of the designs.

Of the 6 new designs featured, 5 had centered layouts, and all were fixed width (Zenfandel does have a header border which extends across the screen, but both content and navigation are fixed in width). Looking further back in the Zen Garden archives shows many more entries of a similar style, 2 or 3 column centered layouts, many either inspiring or inspired by designs seen across the web, such as on Douglas Bowman’s CSS Vault Mosaic.

What is the point I’m trying to make? Well, the CSS Zen Garden is somewhere I go to get inspiration. It is designed to show the flexibility of design using CSS, yet at the moment the entries, I feel, all have very similar characteristics, other than for graphical differences (which, I must add, do continue to inspire). What I really want to see though is people innovating with the CSS to explore different layouts.

There has been a fair bit of talk recently regarding fixed vs liquid layouts. Jeremy Keith argues that designers design fixed width sites largely because all other designers are too. Sheep following sheep. Whilst I think this is largely true (unless you can say you’re not influenced by anything/anyone, you’re going to look at what your peers are doing and base your decisions on that), I also think that user’s browser, resolution, OS differences (et al.) mean that designers believe they cannot ever realise their pixel perfect designs across the board, or do not have the resources to test their design comprehensively, and so often opt for the simpler fixed width version that they know will work.

Whilst I don’t believe this is using the internet as it is intended, what options do we have, other than to follow traditions used in print? And whilst all layout and typography theory (such as the optimum number of words per line etc.) is largely based on research done on the printed page, are we not going to continue to base our decisions on these facts?