Or: How Monitors Can Ruin Your Designs
Yes, the long awaited monitor rant is here. Reinforced by the fact that I checked my two recent attempt while at work. And on my monitor there I could sort of see why someone might not like them. They looked… different from the way they look on my own monitor at home. I could probably change that monitor to match what I have at home, but that would merely solve my frustration not the basic problem.
And the basic problem is this: no matter how you tweak a design, you can’t make it look the same for everyone everywhere. Another good example: my Samsung SyncMaster 940BW can actually cycle through a number of pre-set configurations as well as my own custom setting. I can use this to test what a design might look like on different monitors (probably should do that more often) though none of them happen to match the way my designs looked at work.
When I go over to Starstuff’s Rule-TwentyNine.com and cycle through my screen settings at least one of them makes the blue borders and sidebar background fade into the white background for the rest of the page.1 That of course can be headed off by using something with a bigger contrast, but even then it would look radically different on each setting, and there are people using most (probably all) off these out there.
Which more or less forces you back to Black on White or White on Black if you want to have any real influence over the appearance of your site. Black and White still do fall prey to these settings (especially some of the more ludicrous ones), but the two of them – and to a lesser extend shades of grey – are the closest thing to consistent rendering available. In fact, no matter how wacky the monitor configuration people are likely to know at least what Black and White look like on their own monitor.
Now I’m a control freak when it comes to this sort of thing anyway, but I suspect this would be enough to drive me into ranting territory even if I weren’t. Trying to get things to look the same across browsers is a nightmare already, but at least it can (to an extend) by managed by testing and then coding around the problems. Trying to get things to look the same on different monitors is an exercise in futility.
One would almost wish someone would come up with a standard configuration to be enforced across monitors. Unfortunately that would almost certainly be fucked up, so I guess I’ll have to learn to live with it. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
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1 The same thing goes for some of Wikipedia’s background colours.
Ohm, I have blue borders? And, to be honest, my sidebar background IS white, the rest of the page is a slight greyish (except the background of the page itself, which becomes visible when you drag the browser window wide … that is dark grey). So, either I completely misunderstood you or either you or I have serious problems with our visual range. Care to send me a screenshot?
I’ll send you a screenie (though it’ll look the same since it’s the same monitor that’s rendering the webpage) I’ll see if I can find a way to… enhance the effect.
Thanks for the screenshot … at least I could see that your browser renders some aspects of my layout better than Safari does. Even though I (of course, what was I thinking?) could not see what you are seeing on your screen, I got your point
Worst thing that ever happened to me due to different monitor settings: I had sorted through all my images on my winter vacation in 2006 during the vacation itself … I had taken my MacBook and I had actually started to tweak my images here and there. Imagine my horror when I looked at them back home on my 19″ TFT! They looked awful – my MacBook monitor really is NOT suited for image editing. Luckily, I almost only use the Canon RAW format so I was able to restore the original settings fairly easily. Still, I wasted a lot of time.
I just work with JPEGs from my camera, but I definitely wouldn’t consider working on anything other than my own monitor to edit them. Certainly not without keeping a backup copy of the unaltered file (I usually keep one of those even if I do the enhancement work here at home, just in case).
Guess why I have four separate hard drives standing next to me
Aesthetics?
[...] another humorous picture that I found today (on my own, this time) and which reminded me of Jarsto’s rant about monitor settings. Since it’s also Barack Obama related, I’ll just append it to this [...]