For years, the eternal marketing mantra brainwashed designers into
thinking everything must be above the fold. Different studies support and argue this; one
study argues that designing exclusively above the fold is obsolete,3 and another maintains
that the fold continues to present a barrier to information.4
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3. Jared M. Spool, Christine Perfetti, and David Brittan, ???Designing for the Scent of Information,???
User Interface Engineering (www.uie.com/reports/scent_of_information/).
4. Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger, Prioritizing Web Usability (Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2006).
At one point, the fold was pretty well defined. For years, 8005600 resolution was the gold
standard, with well over two-thirds of Internet users working within that window. At the
time of this writing, 10245768 accounts for more than half of the Web??™s traffic, but the
landscape is significantly more complex, with the vast range of monitor resolutions
(including nontraditional wide-screen ratios) blurring the mathematical definition of the
fold and creating a moving target for designers. For instance, a 7605400 pixel design fits
comfortably within a browser set at 8005600 resolution, but as you can see in Figure 5-9,
it??™s completely dwarfed in a monitor running 160051200.
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