As titles says .. what do you designers think i should go with, i want to make a vbulletin design (not me, my designer) and he asked me what do i want to do, i'm little confused cause i got 2 different opinions, any ideas on this?
When we talk about forums, they need to be fluid. On forums people actually participate and spend more time than sites and blogs, so the forum design should cover the screen as much as possible.
As fluid as possible for a forum. There is always a minimum before thing break. Better to force a scroll than to break. Looks like this board is around 800 wide minimum.
I think fluid is better, since there are many screen resolution available on market. Fixed width looks poor on high resolution screen
design it as though it's intended to be viewed on a 1024x768 scrren, because reality is, if you're viewing it at 1900x you're not going to have the window maximaized, you're going to have it as 1/2 of your desktop and be more productive on the other half. Make it fluid, but also remember line length. Check Newspaper sites or websites that have a lot of writing on them for a good readable line length. Some sites, like Wikipedia have line lengths too long, and it makes reading long passages of text very wearing on the reader. In typography schools they teach a line length of 3 'alphabets' is the optimal length, or about 70 characters per line.
I agree... Typographic style is often overlooked by website designers, but it is very important part of design process. That's why I prefer fixed width, even for forums. 1000 px witdh should looks fine.