Reading these reactions to screen resolution research on .net got me thinking. It’s really easy to just dismiss any findings about screen resolutions these days as completely irrelevant. I mean, we’re totally beyond measuring things in those terribly outdated pixels for web design now, right? But this research also helps verify an opportunity for us.
As an industry we’ve gone years without giving mobile proper consideration and we’re doing our best to make up for that. This tends to have us thinking responsive web design is just 960-ish and smaller. That isn’t really looking at the whole picture. Screens aren’t just getting smaller, they’re getting bigger too!
Take this research with a grain of salt for sure, there are many caveats. But we can also take it as proof there’s an opportunity to do creative things with bigger screen sizes. That there is really a potential audience there. Being resolution and viewport-size independent means considering how we look on the big screens too. The systems (media queries, breakpoints, etc.) we write to make our designs effective on small screens rarely work as-is on the big screens. If you want to look good on the big screens, you need to write rules for that too.
It’s one more thing to consider and one more opportunity to do something creative and awesome :)
