Monitor Resolution

Most computer users can choose to set their monitors to various resolutions. It is possible to make up the screen image with a few large pixels or many more smaller ones - but type ten small pixels high will look proportionally smaller than the same type ten large pixels high. For example on Apple's original CRT iMacs the physical monitor is a constant 15 inches diagonal from corner to corner. Users can set this to display one of three possible resolutions:

1. 640 x 480 - VGA standard. Useful for old software and games which expect this resolution. There are still computer users using monitors at this resolution. Type is large and clear but a bit overpowering for most readers.
2. 800 x 600 - SVGA. I recommend you design your web sites for this screen size display as it is increasingly common and a good midpoint between the other extremes.
3. 1024 x 768 - XGA. This size, and above, were available mostly to designers - the extra space is useful as you can have open tool palettes around the edges of the page you are designing. On a small screen this results in very small type - but on a 17, 19 or 21 inch monitor it is the practical choice. If like creativepro your Web site is aimed at designers then you may wish to work with XGA in mind.

'Think different' Mac and PC font sizes

To further complicate matters, Apple Macs used to display type at different sizes from PCs. Macs show type at 72 pixels per inch (ppi), following hundreds of years of typographic convention whereby a typeface is measured in points (normal reading size varies between 8 to 12 points). Pixel is short for PICture ELement by the way.

There are approximately 72 points to the inch and so in 1984 the desktop publishing Macintosh sensibly used 72 pixels per inch for its screen resolution. As a result, when you looked at 12 point type or drew a line five points wide, it really was that size on screen. This was part of WYSIWYG (pronounced 'wizzywig') an acronym for 'what you see is what you get'.

IBM-compatible Windows PCs are from a different tradition of business and office use and flout the convention by displaying web type at 92 ppi. Since Microsoft has the power to set its own standards despite reason or opposition from Apple, Sun or the official governor of standards the World Wide Web Consortium, this has become the new standard by shear weight of numbers. Type is significantly bigger and more comfortable to read but can result in crowded layouts and an ugly page. Since there are many more Windows PCs than Macs most web pages are designed with Windows in mind - which means the designers initially make type artificially small, ready for Windows browsers to magnify back up to the designer's target size.

Mac users have just had to squint at the unnaturally small type, until the advent of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5 for Mac. This allowed the best of both worlds as you can set it to display type at any size you wish, including both Windows default of 92 ppi or Mac 72 ppi. Mac based web designers should always check their pages with Explorer 5 set to the PC size for a guide to how the pages will display on a PC (better still, check on an actual PC or use an emulator such as RealPC or VirtualPC). As a side-effect, it reduced the unanimous opposition of Mac users against the 92 ppi standard by splitting their viewing demographic. Any users of pre-version 5 Explorer on the Mac will still get the smaller 72ppi type.

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