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I find the period where television was transitioning from 4:3 to 16:9 an interesting one. When broadcasting began in 16:9, but people were still actively using 4:3 televisions, broadcasters would commonly either letterbox the content or expect the left and right edges to be cropped. This led to a period where television series direction avoided putting anything too important at the horizontal edges of the frame. Cinema faced similar challenges, and either embraced pan-and-scan, letterboxing, or careful reframing from a wider image.

Content made exclusively for television broadcast, such as news shows, often had all interface elements centred in the image with nothing of substance in the 16:9 exclusive portions:

You can see this effect in action with The Onion’s morning show, Today Now!. Compare Disney Geneticists Debut New Child Stars, which is in 4:3, to Missing Teen’s Friends Go On TV To Plead For Her Release, Gossip About Ugly Classmates, which is in 16:9 but includes all important information within a 4:3 safe zone.

To mitigate the complexities of working with two aspect ratios, broadcasters (mainly in Europe) opted for an aspect ratio of 14:9 as a compromise. It wasn’t optimal on 16:9 displays or 4:3 displays and was pillarboxed or letterboxed, respectively.

The cropping of a wider image reminds me of open mattes, which is where film is captured at a larger size and then matted down to a specific aspect ratio, such as by applying bars on the tops (letterboxing) or sides (pillarboxing). Take the 35mm open matte of Spider-Man (2002). Extra content is there; it is just hidden by the aspect ratio. It is by this method that more full frames can be achieved by merging various source mediums.

The embrace of 16:9 from 4:3 is also tied up in the switch from standard definition to high definition and analogue to digital, meaning that content is large on the screen – especially text, which can be blurred by low-resolution displays and fuzzy CRTs. It is an interesting period of transition, and as a front-end developer I can’t help but think of it in terms of progressive enhancement.

For people without widescreen displays, content functioned and continued as normal without interruption. For people with capable television sets, however, they got an improved experience. As time progressed and 4:3 became less common, it switched from progressive enhancement to graceful degradation on displays still using the old aspect ratio, as we often see as newer technology reaches wider adoption.

Some applications and websites have inbuilt theming capabilities. Others lack anything of the sort but can be themed by external means.

I’d prefer people don’t theme or alter my work, as a painter prefers people not to alter their paintings. Please don’t theme our apps pops to mind. Of course, the web is a medium in which some modification can be expected. From zooming, to forcing fonts, to high-contrast mode, etc, people will modify sites. Particularly on the web, people will theme and modify things as they see fit. It is very much part of the platform’s ethos – user agent stylesheets and extensions and whatnot.

I know that I personally alter websites all the time. Whether that be deleting an element, forcing dark mode, stopping an annoying visual effect, or something more substantial. I also know that people have altered websites I’ve worked on (and icons I’ve designed), and that doing so usually makes me feel something adjacent to bad, conjuring thoughts of ‘Have I failed, such that people must undo or change my work?’.

Another line of thought in my own theming of sites (and indeed, creation of my own bespoke apps) is that I’m being exposed to less design. Exposure to different interfaces and flourishes is inspiring. You find new interface patterns and stay up-to-date with trends by seeing what is popular and in use. As a developer and designer, keeping track with what is ‘in’ is important, as is finding inspiration to motivate oneself and apply to other contexts. By forcing everything existing into my own rigid pre-existing structures, I’m walling myself off. In some cases, this is necessary, such as when the design is really bad or user-hostile, but in many other cases it is something I’m doing out of pure comfort with the known.

‘Did you add an extra page to the site just so the footer links would balance nicely?’

Me? No. Pfft. I— Y’know— Me? Ha. I— I’d never! Not something I’d do… nope…

I love dark mode, but it mustn’t be the only option. For a lot of people, white text upon a dark background is illegible.

Common eye conditions like astigmatism, myopia, and presbyopia can make content look foggy, become hard to focus on, and cause eye strain.

The above effect is especially exacerbated by strong contrast, like pure white on pure black. However, different conditions benefit from different levels of contrast. For example, people with conditions such as cataracts, aniridia, and achromatopsia can benefit from low-contrast visuals. The prefers-contrast CSS media feature is fantastic for tailoring to your user’s needs.

You can’t put important links exclusively in your site’s footer if you have infinite scroll.

You can’t have infinite scroll if you put important links exclusively in your site’s footer.

Please stop.

Growing increasingly frustrated as I attempt in vain to explain how one can modify the browser chrome of a browser that isn’t Chrome to look like chrome. That is, to change the chrome of a non-Chrome browser to look like chrome, without making it look like Chrome.