Beth,

Designers' screen size and assumptions about users' screen sizes has been an interesting dance through the history of web design. I remember telling students at (here's a bit of a coincidence) UC Davis in 1999 that, although we had gone from 640 px x 480 px monochrome to 128 colors to larger and were moving larger and more colors as the baseline assumption, the world would belong to anyone who could figure out how to communicate on [holding up my trusty Palm Pilot] this. 

They looked at me like I'd grown an extra set of ears and asked what they would ever want to look up on the web while they were out driving around. (This is a sign of what the world looked like then, not a criticism of my students. They were some of the smartest students I've ever had and several of them have gone on to do work that I'm proud to pretend like I had a tiny part in.) It's nice to look back on past predictions and find a few that aren't comically wrong. 

East Carolina University (where I teach) is going to roll out a redesigned website in January. (I had nothing to do with it and I've never had any voice in ECU's design.) They promoted it as needed because web stats show that people visiting ecu.edu were using higher resolution screens. I think that http://www.ecu.edu/redesign/ is an improvement over http://www.ecu.edu/ for both technical and aesthetic reasons but not enough of one and certainly not mainly because the world has been demanding that ECU be a few pixels wider. 

I need to look at what happens to the new ecu.edu on a smart phone or other tiny screen because the site I designed for the graphic design program (http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm) was based on making the world's third worst content management system (ECU is unfailing in its quest to buy expensive bad software and to require us to use it) work with web standards, an awful format set up for the School of Art & Design, and the geometry and brand of East Carolina University. Big chunks of the design logic of our graphic design site will crumble with the introduction of the new and improved ECU.

And, I'm guessing, the audience for our website will be more and more likely to be looking us up on their phones.

You've identified a big problem in design (especially graphic design) education. What seems obvious to us--print stuff out and look at the paper for print work and look at something on various screens for work that will appear on various screens--is not obvious to students. The WYSIWYG illusion is seductive. 

This is part of why I shake my head at much of the talk on this list of abandoning art/craft heritage for the more sophisticated realms of design. So much discussion seems to be about thinking vs. making. At ECU, we struggle to help our students become people who make stuff AND think (and who use the way they make stuff in order to think.) The visceral sense of what they are creating is vital to the success of what they are creating. Getting past the insulation of how it looks on the screen is crucial.

Sometimes I think I could be replaced in class by a parrot that repeats "Make it real; do that fast."


Gunnar
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Gunnar Swanson Design Office
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Greenville NC 27858
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On Oct 29, 2011, at 11:24 PM, Beth E. Koch wrote:

> In my typography classes, nearly every beginning student makes type too big while working on their computers and they can't see what they've done wrong until they print out their project on paper.
> 
> Likewise, I would bet money that the designers of the UC Davis design website were working on a huge oversized monitor!
> 
> Tech bug bites again!
> 
> Beth E. Koch