Fresh

Gosh, we sure are lucky to be making websites for the world wide internets these days.  Not only do we have advanced CSS, widgets, and fancy javascript doohickeys, but we have an audience with broadband connections, modern browsers, higher screen resolutions and bigger monitors!  Which gives us all the reason in the world to design sites with BIG, BEAUTIFUL BACKGROUNDS.

No longer are we trapped by solid colors or boring repeating 1kb GIF backgrounds (not that people don’t do amazing things with simple backgrounds).  Now we can slap gigantic JPGs or PNGs (or SWFs) on our body tags or wrapper divs and get away with it.  And you don’t even have to be building a fancy artist site, either.

Not convinced big backgrounds work in real-world web design?  Check this out: the design blog Web Designer Wall has an eye-popping round up of 80 gorgeous sites with big backgrounds.  Although there are a fair amount of creative agency, artist, and designer sites on the list, you’ll also find sites for restaurants, golf courses, tourism, software  – and of course, blogs.  (Included in the list is eROI alumni George Huff’s blog, eleven3!)

Here are my favorites:

GOTOCHINA

montereyinfo.org (ahhh, clouds)

Lipton Green Tea Mint

The Mattinator

And so many more… check it out for yourself.

I wouldn’t say all of the 80 websites completely succeed at their large background forays.  For example, it bugs me when the background image abruptly stops if the screen is too wide.  It’s pretty easy to make your big, beautiful background gracefully fade away when it’s just not big enough to fill the viewing area (and there are some BIG monitors out there), so there’s no excuse for not doing it.  The tricky part with big backgrounds: making them look good even if they get stuffed into 1024×600 or even 800×600 window.   Does the design still work even if you can’t see the awesome Photoshop painting you made peeking out from either side of your blog content?

One example I found recently that strikes a perfect chord with its big backgrounds is the site for web design company Duoh! (recently redesigned by co-founder/CSS guru Veerle Pieters). Duoh!’s new look features striking geometric design elements, impeccable detail, fun colors, sleek CSS and of course – big, beautiful backgrounds.  But the site has respect for users with smaller resolutions. It’s been designed so that if you have a 1024 x 728 resolution screen, you don’t see any evidence of something missing or cut off.  The design still seems complete.  If you do have a larger screen and resolution, Duoh!’s big backgrounds feature easter-egg-like bits of design and text – little ‘extra’ treats for people who can see them.

And if you view the site on a screen even bigger than 1680×1050?  You’ll see the backgrounds fill the expanse, and eventually fade away into the default background color.  That’s some smart big-background-thinkin’.  Like their tagline says:  Duoh! = Beauty & Brains.

And just in case those smaller-screen visitors feel left out, Duoh! also has the big, beautiful backgrounds available for download as desktop images (and for those extra-small smaller-screen visitors, they’ve included iPhone desktops, too).

This is an option I believe we here at Fresh should offer too – after all, we have our own big, beautiful backgrounds to show off (and more to come, too!).  So keep an eye out for a Fresh desktop gallery, as well as some other nifty features, coming soon.