Flash best practice: stage dimension 1000×570

Before starting on the design a Flash website, first thing first, the dimension of the file must be decided. Even full browser flash (FBF) sites can’t run away from this. I’ve seen sites that have overlapping text due to wrong dimensions, such as this new FWA site.

Based on w3cschool’s statistics, the most popular screen resolution is still 1024×768 (54%) and quite a portion are using higher resolutions or wide screens (26%). So, most of the sites should target for 1024×768 users unless it is confirmed that the majority of the visitors use something else based on web analytics.

The next step is to decide the dimension of the Flash file that can sit in a 1024×768 screen beautifully. You can’t use 1024×768 as the Flash file dimension, because the browser takes up quite significant amount of space. At the top of a browser there are title, menu, address, bookmark and very likely some google/yahoo toolbar. At the bottom of a browser there’s also a status bar. There are some thin borders on both sides, too. For popup windows, the browser definitely has a title bar and for IE7 the address bar is compulsory and for Firefox the status bar can’t be taken out.

After a few rounds of trial and error, I find 1000×570 is the most promising dimension for non-popup Flash sites. It is the maximum width and height that can nicely fit into both IE(with 1 toolbar) and Firefox. For popup sites, the recommended dimension is 1000×700.

I believe Flash designers and developers do not use a low resolution like 1024×768. It’s a good practice that always test the site in 1024×678 screen resolution to make sure everything is visible to the user and the design looks good.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2007 at 6:05 am and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.