December 16, 2005: About size
Big is beautiful, in moderation.
Posted on 2005-12-17 01:04 by Jørn Støylen [permalink]
(Today marks the first day of my 2005 Christmas Calender Blog Run where I technically don’t publish within the 24 hours of the day. I could backdate it, but that would be cheating. And for many intents and purposes, it’s still the 16th.)
There’s a discussion going on about the size of elements used in designing web pages. Paul Scrivens talks about it in his blog, Whitespace, and he quotes Garret Dimon. There’s probably other stuff to read about it too.
The big mass of bloggers, web designers, information architects etc. sometimes seems a bit scary to me, for the most part for untangible reasons. I can feel stuff brooding, flocks of sheep getting restless, lynchmobs unconsciously banding, cliques—or even rival gangs—forming. All over issues like whether stuff on web pages should be big or small, or whether the people at 37 Signals are gods or pompous, self-righteous know-it-alls.
(For the record, I think they’re mostly staters of the obvious. I love their products (Backpack, Basecamp and of course Ruby on Rails), but I wish they would spend their energy on making them even better, not on fishing for approval by saying stuff that most people will agree with anyhow. They were better a while back when I started reading their blog, Signal vs. Noise, but I’ve grown tired of them and unsubscribed now.)
Here’s what happens: Someone (re)discovers something obvious. (For example that less is more. But with less stuff, there’s room for the stuff that’s there to be bigger. And suddenly all the elements grow, and the web site looks different than most others that don’t use big things, and it works.) Many more people see this, and start getting influenced. Soon “everyone” does the same thing, and at the same time someone blogs about it, praising it (for example, saying that big is good). A short while after someone else blogs about it, saying it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, that it’s nothing new, everything’s been done before and you should do what’s appropriate for the situation. Then many people blog about the discussion, and there’s a mini war about it. (Hey, I guess I’m among those!) And then it dies out, and someone blogs about the next big trend on the Internet, rinse, repeat.
If I were to say something about size, I’d mention a piece of software called Sudoku Susser, which is an excellent piece of software. (It’s not perfect or streamlined, but it does its job—helping you to solve Sudoku puzzles—very well. If you’re into Sudokus, check it out—it’s available for both Mac and Windows.)
What I wanted to mention is that if you resize the window, the board also resizes. I’ve found that there’s a pretty short size range where I find it comfortable. Too small, and it gets hard to see. Too big, and I lose the overview; I have to move my eyes around a lot and it gets hard or impossible to see the whole board at once. (It’s a bit like sitting in the front row in front of a huge movie screen: It’s harder to follow the action when you have to turn your head 45 degrees to see from one edge to the other.)
My advice: Make it just right for the occasion. If it’s something that a user has to see or has to click on, make it big (easy to identify, easy to click). If it’s something that you don’t want to emphasize or that few people use rarely, make it small (out of the way, but still there). Otherwise, make it just right.
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