The Montoya Herald, a weblog about Blueprint, jQuery, design, music and life, publishing on the web since September 2005. Written by Christian Montoya: developer, designer and entrepreneur.

Liquid Designs launched

Posted on September 24, 2005.

I'm really, really exhausted.

It seems that designing websites while studying Electrical Engineering is not easy. I've slept about ten hours total over the past two nights and here I am launching a new web site because I just couldn't wait any longer.

Liquid Designs was an idea I've been working on for a couple weeks. Ever since I got my new widescreen laptop and the Firefox Developler's toolbar I've been playing with window sizes and I've found that I prefer liquid layouts. Especially those with large text. Even this website, hideous as it might be, has it's own charm. Maybe I just like that fact that there is minimal white space whether I view at fullscreen or cut the browser window in half to see other applications.

Hopefully this won't be seen as a "me-too gallery" or a lame attempt to defend liquid layouts. It's just a personal project and whether or not it goes anywhere is fine with me. If it does make me famous, that's a bonus.

Tell me what you guys think (you are reading this? wow!) because I don't use counters or anything like that. I'm gonna take some benadryl and pass out now.

edit: Goodness, I even misspelled "Phonophunk." Smooth like sandpaper.

edit 2: Thoughts on "Liquid Designs"

So Liquid Designs has been active for one weekend. I've got mixed feelings, as usual. I'm not totally satisfied with the layout, though it is pretty good considering how little time I had to work on it. I think it looks best at 1024 or 1280 px, and it's usable at 800 pixels or 1600 pixels. One of the decent things is it's even usable at 640 pixels or 3200 pixels. I can't argue with that. I'm going to submit the site to some galleries now, but I'm comfortable with the fact that it probably won't be recognized, and rightly so.

I don't know if the site will be successful, but so far it has been successful as a personal project, in that I have learned a lot more about liquid layouts, web design, wordpress, and search engine optomization than I expected. I've found some great techniques for dealing with the cons of liquid layouts and I've learned a lot about how fads are treated in the web design community. From what I've learned, I'm willing to declare three things right here:

1. Liquid layouts with a working implementation of max-width are the most accessible layouts and provide the best layout for a website.
2. People are really stuck on fixed layouts. They prefer fixed layouts because they are easier to make, and everybody is doing them. Even though all of the arguments against liquid layouts can be overcome with the use of various techniques like max-width, most designers still insist that these problems can't be solved, and will continue to think this way for a long time.
3. A lot of designers say that liquid layouts shouldn't be used because they are too wide at resolutions of 1600 pixels and up. My assumptions are this: anyone who can afford a display that big can afford to use Firefox / Mozilla / Opera / Safari, and probably uses one of those already. If they do, then max-width should not be a problem for them. The rest of the world, the "common user" that we all design for, are just not using big displays. Poor college kids like me can at best use up to 1280 pixels… and I don't even use Internet Explorer. Even if I did, if I had a big display I would probably have Javascript enabled (because rich kids usually do). So Javascript techniques that apply max-width to Internet Explorer would still not be lost on me. In the end, the number of users that are affected by the lack of max-width support in Internet Explorer on big, expensive displays, is probably none. Maybe even 0%. Therefore, the argument is probably moot point.

If anyone is interested in learning more about how to make liquid layouts work, you can visit the resources page of Liquid Designs. Otherwise, I'd like to ask for everyone's help in supporting the project. Put a link on your website, tell some friends, share it with others. I would really appreciate it!

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