What size screen to use as a baseline when designing for a new site? One answer that has been suggested is:

Quit thinking like a print designer. Embrace the variability that is a browser viewport. Size relatively, which can work for 200×400 and all the way up as high as high gets.

I think this is a rather over simplistic response, assuming we’re talking about applying the relative sizing to every element of the design. It seems to suggest that a design or layout should be conceived as a rectangle with arbitrary relative dimensions, and that those dimensions should be preserved at all resolutions through relative sizing? Sorry, but that sounds like print thinking to me, and in that case how small is the text going to be at 200×400 if it’s presentable at 800×600?

Meanwhile, whilst I do indeed “embrace the variability”, there are literally infinite possible variations to the size and proportion of the browser viewport. I humbly suggest that it is unreasonable to expect, and frankly, impossible to achieve a design that will be uniformly “brilliant” in every case. While of course the variety of possible modes of final presentation have to be kept in mind, the initial design work is going to have to take place on a fixed-size canvas. If one sets what I think is the reasonable aim of producing a design that will look as good as possible in any presentation mode, then it follows that there are presentation modes in which it will look better than others. Hence it makes sense to attempt to find some congruence between looking better and the probability of any particular presentation mode. I’m not advocating that the ideal is to create a design that is in some abstract and necessarily highly subjective sense “perfect” for one particular window size and screen resolution and progressively worse in any other environment, but rather to look as good as possible in the widest possible range of environments while accepting that some environments are going to be more common, and that right now a screen resolution of 1024×768 is perhaps the most common. I think this an honest and honorable goal, and there are many options at our disposal in our attempts to achieve it, one, but only one, of which is certainly relative sizing.