I’ve been using an Adobe AIR application called BOKS to build my grids lately: http://toki-woki.net/p/Boks/ – it lets you specify a width, gutter size, column size, number of columns, etc etc. You might want to check it out!

I think the font size is not a problem, It depends on the current design.

While I definitely believe the width must fit the project, I have recently been annoyed when trying to surf websites using a grid just a little larger than 960px on an iPad or netbook with 1024×600 resolution. The site is just a tad too wide and forces you to scroll left and right to see the content.

I do not see the point of designing just wide enough to be annoying to those at 1024 width and not wide enough to take advantage of the next full screen resolution (ie: 1280 wide).

I’ve have no trouble using a grid based on the 960 one for the majority of projects. Its mentioned above about that annoying size that hits scrollbars far to frequently on tighter screens.

I’m a big fan of pushing graphics and such just beyond this size though, so that those on larger displays get a much more comfortable layout but those on tighter ones don’t see any horizontal scrollbars.

Check out fluid 960, it’s excellent.
http://www.designinfluences.com/fluid960gs/

That is a nice thought, the web does change very fast and 960 will get old sometime. But luckly it will be painless, since we can easily create new grid systems based on 960.

I think the best layout I’ve found so far is the 960 grid, 3 column at 300px with 20px gutter, combined with css media queries. Scales down to 640px 2 column grid (for ipads for example) and 320px 1 column grid (for iphones for example). You could extend this to 4 column 1280px width too for those lucky people with large monitors. Everyone wins.

Also standard 6×4 photos scale nicely in pro to 300px x 200px so they fit the grid too.

For me, I primarily use 960gs for blogs and simple business sites that I do for clients then rarely ever touch again. At my full time job, I use the Eric Meyer CSS Reset and go custom from there. So, it depends on the task at hand for me. I do like the 24 column layout though.

960gs is still the best by far!

I think it’s a shame people would only use 960px of a screen while most screens are 1280 width plus. My idea, keep the default 960 for cranky old people and use a bit dynamic width up to 1280 to give users with a bigger screen an advantage.

What a lot of people are forgetting is that there are built-in classes to alleviate half the problems you described in this article or some of the complaints in the comments.

.alpha and .omega will reduce the margins on the front and back respectively of whatever column it’s attached to (e.g., class=”grid_6 alpha omega”).

Also, .push_n and .pull_n will extend your columns on the front and back respectively however many columns n you specify.

If you want a larger width, just go into 960 and find and replace the number 960 with 978 or 60 with 54.

Not sure what you are comparing? Themify is a theme for WordPress? 960.gs is grid system to be used for any platform.

960 is still the best, once we notice an upswing in larger screens hitting our site, then I might think about changing, but for now, still the best.

Interesting article. However, the 978 grid actually gives you LESS usable space for type when you factor in those 30px gutters in a 12-column configuration.

978px – (11 x 30px) = 648px
960px – (11 x 20px) = 740px

I’m sticking with 960gs.

Once you’ve decided what you want, you can use compass with blueprint and assign how large your margins are, how many columns you use and how large the grid is.

I find it pretty useful.

I think I like the 978 better. In general this size will keep getting bigger as monitor sizes keep getting bigger and cheaper. Though laptops may continue to remain pretty small, that’s always something to factor in.

I also think the 960px thing is a waste because what if you would like to add something to your site in the future and want to make it wider. Exactly you would have to start all over again. I prefer to use my own framework :)

For 2 last years I came up with my own grid.

It’s 980px 12 column with 10px gutter.
Benefits: Wider, for more content. Standard width of all three columns 300px each so not only right banner is ok but all visual patterns you use as well. Pretty comfortable to shift from standard 8+4 to 7+5 columns. Like yahoo homepage or linkedin.com did for different reasons.
Especially good for large scale ia.

If you’re interested just find me on Twitter or Skype and I will send you psd

really it is good thing to think of… but I feel 960 grid work very well…

Thanks for share..

Sounds interesting. I’ve been using the 960 grid system for awhile and I did found out that it doesn’t work with some projects but it never crossed my mind to use other grid system or even come up with a new one.

problem with 960gs is that its not fluid.
in todays era when everyone have 1080p monitors as well as a smartphone you need to make adaptive layouts.

Please tell me if i am being a little naive but will increasing the width by a mere 18px make that much of a difference.

However in an almost contradictive manner I do find the outside margins of the 960.gs a little annoying (only giving you a true 940px workspace).

Interesting post anyway. Always enjoy your work.

Erick S. You’re missing the point with grids, if you have a 16 column grid you might not necessarily use a single column, but the more columns have the more flexibility you have to use combinations of these columns to create layouts, so you might have one page using a 4 col sidebar, 8 col main content & 4 col another sidebar and then another page using 4 x 4 text columns, etc etc all using a base 16 col grid.

I never used a grid-system when designing a website, but it seems to me that the grid system really depends on the site that is being built.

I use 960 as well, and always found it a good basic start. While working with it, I twick it from time to time as the needs change. You can also try using http://www.spry-soft.com/grids/. You can change grid and gutter width.

I think we’re going to be seeing the opposite problem: with so much content being read on mobile phones and now on the iPad (and even paying consideration to the crappy view offered by most netbooks), I think we’re going to be seeing more and more single-column layouts. The outer portions of the “page” may be decorated or filled with imagery, but the main content needs to be able to flow into these smaller viewports.

I have never used grid system :)

I approach each project as it’s own thing, so I don’t use a grid system.

While i agree that the 960 is somewhat constraining at times, what I hate more is un-rounded numbers, especially when designing for a CMS. The beauty of 960 is that all the columns are even and if you practice pixel perfection that is important.

Like Brett said above, you can always go to 980.

The 960 grid is a great starting point for rapid developement and even better for creating fast mockups without having to put too much thought into the mechanic. As designers howver, we need to consider that it is content and purpose of a site that ultimately determines layout.

I really use 960gs. You want to use 960 abandon and i am working in website template design company it should be very professional in next few year

Nice idea but what about mobile? I know that iOS devices display at bang on 960px width (not sure about Android) so won’t this mean we are clipping off bits of content on these devices?

960gs isn’t only 12 columns.. the 960.gs has templates for 12 24 or 16 column grids. But the whole point of the system is that 960 is..

“divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 32, 40, 48, 60, 64, 80, 96, 120, 160, 192, 240, 320 and 480. This makes it a highly flexible base number to work with.”

Which means you can easily have a 24 column grid, 6 column grid, 8 column grid, 32 column grid or whatever. Although i agree that 940px content area is sometimes a bit small, due to its flexibility i dont think the 978px grid will be taking over anytime soon.

We’re in the middle of a redesign on our app UpShot and we decided to use BaselineCss (simple, html5, light).

The base width is 960 and instead of changing the grid width we are changing the visual sugar place. Basically it means that we really use 960px for content and moved our sheet design outside.

Our users are mainly webdesigners so it’s okay on their big screens and users under 1024 might be under ie6 too so they don’t have sugar anyway ;)

Fine, I’ll say it. Stupid post based purely on personal preference, with an exaggerated title, just to get traffic. This article sucks.

Not sure the extra 18 pixels is worth blogging about IMHO. Especially when (as mentioned) flexible grids are available anyway.

Personally, I do not use grids at all but as the survey suggests it depends on the project :)

Blueprint (via the BOKS application) works best for me. Width can be set at will, number of columns can be any number starting from 1 to …, and it has multiple combination for width+gutter.

@Lucas That logic doesn’t really work. How can a grid system make websites stale and common? Are all print magazine layouts using say a 24 column grid on A4, stale and common because they use the same number of columns in the same width?

I have considered using a framework but most of my work is converting designers psd’s to html for wordpress. Many[I mean, many] designers have no idea what the 960 system is, or they create more free-form designs that do not follow any “structure”, therefore, most frameworks are useless for these projects.

I also think frameworks limit creativity for designs other than a magazine layout perhaps.

There is nothing as flexible as understanding raw CSS that YOU write IMO. Too many new coders relying on frameworks before they even understand what float:right does.

I’ve always been a bit reluctant to formally work with the 960. Partly because wireframing programs don’t have any sort of overlay for them and partly because I rarely work on anything outside the one column & sidebar or one column and 2 sidebar fields. But great post and a great rethink, there’s definitely some teeth to your concept.

Love the 13px font size and 30px spacing. Better reading :)

I’ve used the 960 frame for awhile. Lately I’ve been using a 24 column layout, but wouldn’t mind trying something new. I’ll look into the 978 grid you present for future projects.

“As screens and resolutions have gotten bigger, I’ve found that the 960 grid system does not always fit my needs. 20px gutters and only a 940px content area is a bit too small for the modern web.”

So the solution is to add 18 pixels? Aren’t we splitting hairs here? I don’t see how it addresses the problem, unless the problem of the 960 gs not being big enough wasn’t a very serious problem to begin with.

Nick: So the solution is to add 18 pixels?

I agree, rather underwhelming. I think such rigid adherence to one specific grid system isn’t a good idea.

I keep it to 960 or less… there are so many PC users unfortunately that have the resolutions set to 1024px that using the 960 gird makes website look best.

Taking out the left and right margins is a bad idea.

I like magic numbers: 54px/30px = 1.8. I’ve seen that ratio often when whipping open Firebug on magazine sites. If I’m correct, default paragraph indenting is 1.8em.

960 pix is fine for now i think.

Top 50 Online Design Magazines – http://www.cruzine.com/2010/09/13/top-online-design-magazines/

Good post, I agre with you we need to start using 978 grid.

I believe its a good idea, making it wider makes a good sense..This is similar to the PC screens today – they are all getting wider.. Though 978 is close to 960, this little difference might have big effect/use on the design.. Well, lets just see in the future if what size will be adapted as the new designers favorite :-)

That poll is unanswerable like “Have you stopped beating your wife?”
I am liquid layout only. I believe it is arrogant to take over a user’s entire screen, so I never do. Plus small screens of mobile devices are trying to view those very same pages more and more. And remember TimBL invented HTML to be device independent — that is not a bug, it is a feature.

Less Framework looks interesting, but is that working only for blog sites or does it work for any kind of sites? I’d be curious to see websites done with it.

Damn, this site died almost a year ago. What happened to frequent posts and good articles?

i still prefer cssMechano
http://www.cssMechano.com

A small point: the reason 960px is often used as the standard for “fixed” designs is not just because it fits on 1024×768 screens. It’s because 960px is easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, etc., which makes it a very useful width, especially when you’re dealing with grids.

In most cases the people that contact us do not have high-dollar screen displays or even moderate displays. Most of the people that view our website with fancy crap are other designers trying to snake us for leads. I could care less how their system references our sites, in fact I hope their legs grow together. In my experience most clients still have a large contingent of staff that have ie6 installed and a big fat monitor that takes up half their desk (including the post-it notes and family pictures tacked to the frame). It doesn’t really do us any good to keep up with the cool kids when are clients don’t have that equipment.

Thanks for the find boss… I never heard of 960 :-)

-Daniel

hi.. i’m using the 960gs. and as i read your article i got curious to work with your 978gs. where can i find a link for the grid sys?

I might try it, but I think I will probably stick to 960 for now for the most, the extra few pixels don’t seem worth it for content to be butted up to the edges on 1024. I’ll wait for the next big jump. Ultimately it depends on the project and target audience though for the grid we use or don’t use if the case may be.

Some of these comments seem pretty heated. If 978 doesn’t appeal to you, then use whatever you feel is best. I, however, think the idea is clever enough that I decided to start a fan following.

Here’s the site: http://978.gs/

thanks for the link… surely i’ll gonna try to use it. and compare both.

Me eiather! Thx alot for bringing this up!

/MoShO

Great idea. I think the layout really depends on the type of project you are working on. Keep in mind that there is still a big area of sites that still don’t even use grids yet. So to me, to think about modifying the 960 grid to something different can be considered a sense of fringe design. A cool idea but dependent on the project you are working on…

I think Stefan (comment #20) nailed it – I fail to see why 18px makes a difference. Especially if you have a larger screen resolution – all the more insignificant 18px will be.

My biggest concerns with fixed grids are that they are… fixed :)
For me, I don´t know what is hardest – make a tight frontend ready for all screensolutions, textsizes etc etc in a fixed layout or learn liquid-layouts with custom designelement that is hard to stretch… anyhow – a bigger grid is needed. Thank you!

Why would you need so much space for your gutter (30 px)? Doesn’t that eat into your content space? A range of 16-20px gutter seems fine to me and a lot better than 10 px.

Its great posting about this grid system..Its very useful to us..Thanks for share

I think this is very much dependent on the project. But clearly evident, add padding to the container is more correct than the columns.

i like the 960px grid :-/

Me and my friend were arguing about an issue similar to this! Now I know that I was right. lol! Thanks for the information you post.

Overflow Hidden in .container

Great write up! I just could never really wrap around using these on my projects. I should take a closer look at what you’ve come up with a try to use it on my next project.

I love the grid…. its definitely got a strong place next to the 960 that I have used for some time now…. BUT

The 960 grid has a setting where every block has a 20px left margin…. you stack them all together and you end up with a 940 effective width – but you need to use 980px to accomodate the margins. This is nice because everything is plug and play. Move your left hand block to the right and the margin stays the same.

In order to have this option with the 978px grid you need the 15px margin to stay even for the far left and right – this then ends up hitting 1008px used space…. meaning you break out of the 996px limit we should still be considering. (1024 x 768 minus the scrollbar). This might be suitable for some people – but I can’t help but feel its just a few pixels too wide.

I wonder if the maths allows a few pixels to come off this – perhaps I’m over thinking it?

i think it depends on the project too. Im working on a site now and it’s about right for the content and scope of the site but generally, i feel 940 is a bit small..

interesting post, I’m keen to try the 978gs

Well since centered layouts are more evil than web 2.0 & tables combined, 960 is outdated. But I think “web designers” just have too much time doing the easiest thing in computing.

Interesting input! I think i’ll give the 978 a try.

i think it is actually depending on the project…but new ideal will brings improvement…i support…thanks for sharing…..

Grid system’s are great if you design them from scratch using one of the psd or png files you can download from the website.

If you do not use them from the get go they are far more frustrating to use than writing css from scratch. One of our designers LOVES grids and will use it NO MATTER WHAT. I personally feel this is a really bad attitude and have had many an argument with him over it. Everything has it’s place.

When 960 first came up I gave it a go and did a few websites with it, but I have shy’d away from it now. Nowadays it’s either CSS from scratch (well.. using the template I’ve made of course), or it’s a 980px with 16 to 20 columns so I have far more versatility.

Is 978 a safe width to use? I’ve always heard that 960 was the maximum witdth to avoid horizontal scrollbars across all browsers and OS.

@Anthony Alexander – Wow. Are you really trolling a web design site?

I am re-desinging my website soon, I will try out the 978 format.

I’m really sick with the 960px grid. I have tried some layouts on my most resent site. 960px is too small. So I decided to go for 1280 screens.. and made my grid 1150px wide. I have some amazing results, but still it is a very very brave move. There is a data available about screen resolutions and you should go and search for it before making the decision.

For the author: you will always find people unwilling to understand change. There will always be someone to complain when change arrive. On the other hand, we – the designers, always seeks new ways to express our ideas. So I don’t really understand what is the core problem with your, should I say, proposal for new layout. You build it and you can monitor it. So at sometime in the future show us the results.

You solve my problem.Thanks for sharing with us

My websites don’t have a specific “grid system” exactly. For a resolution of 1024 X 768 I find that a total width of 960px works pretty well. I create a page div of exactly this width and center it within the body. Everything goes right to the edges of this container.

My page header is 960px, for example. I came up with this width early on because it worked well with a variety of browsers even with differences in how they displayed the page. I actually had no idea that there was a 960px standard of any kind.

At a 1024 X 768 resolution I recommend going with this. At higher resolutions (which are now becoming more popular), I would adjust accordingly. The real question here is, who is your audience? What kind of resolution will they be running their computers at?

My customers tend to be people with really old computers. 1024 X 768 is likely to be their screen resolution. If your site visitors are people with wide screen monitors (gamers, people dealing with a lot of graphics, multimedia, etc.) You might want a site that is geared towards their needs instead. Pick your optimum screen resolution and figure out the maximum width that can be safely displayed on a variety of browsers. Everything else follows from there.

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Thanks for your find. It wil be helpful for our upcoming projects to make them more expressive & impressive. Thx again for sharing this post.

http://www.freecssshowcase.com/

Consider the above link for your reference of more design inspiration & for the free CSS templates.

Why not use the css generator that the 960gs website supplies? With it, you can create any number of columns, any width, any gutter width. Why relearn a whole new css gridding system when you could symply adjust the current one with a supplied online tool?

I didn’t even realise this 960 grid system existed until recently, but I’ve seen an awful lot about it for one reason or another over the past few days. Has it come to the fore for any particular reason?

I designed our site using a centralised 990px wide format. I used this because I thought this was somewhat standard, I’ve seen it about a lot, it works well with my 1024 monitor, even the BBC use it, I believe… and I love the BBC. Are people swayed towards the 960gs purely because of it’s compatability with the Golden Ratio?

I never liked the 960 grid myself. Since I do both design and coding, trying to keep up with all the different grid classes seemed too much.

Personally, I keep all designs at 1000px or smaller, and keep elements within the design divisible by 10. This way I don’t have a 3px padding on the right, and a 8 px pad to the left and have to keep up with all of those.

At least with everything divisible by 10, I can keep pads even, gutters even, etc. If I really need room, then I can cut back to divisible by 5 or 2 when needed, but I try to keep it more simpler.

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Nice blog with the great news. Now i’m clear with this stuff over the 960 grid system. Some informatives here are new to me.

Thank you for share this sweet stuff & make me clear with it.

Great, tips. I been doing a lot of SEO/SEM in the past and I was pretty sure I know everything about this field but with your article I realized you can still teach new tricks to old dogs. I’ll be reading your other posts.

A new way to improve the usability of website with the help of a new concept of sreendesign. Interesting. Thank you.

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I think you didnt find the way to increase the width of the 960.gs grid system. Go to the site and look there is way to make it more width as you wish, also gutter can be reduced as we wish.

Thanks
Manzu

To Support 960gs –> WebDesignerWall.com uses 960 grid system :D

Bright idea, hope there can be more useful articles about。

I personally think this is a nonsense. The ideal grid is the one which fits on your needs. There is no a standard column or gutter width to apply, just think what you need for the design you are doing and full stop. I’ve been using Blueprint for a quite long time and I believe I didn’t use the same measures twice.

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This is verry good.

I was wondering if you ever considered changing the page layout of your website? Its very well written; I love what youve got to say. But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so people could connect with it better. Youve got an awful lot of text for only having one or 2 images. Maybe you could space it out better?

Its all what works for you, 960 Grid works for us.

Just found out about the 960 grid system today. O_O And it’s now old. Tsk tsk tsk… I’m very behind in the web news. O_O

I agree with Fidelity. But I think it depends on the project. There are certain kinds of projects that benefit from more space available.
However, I believe the best approach for interface design right now is to be concerned with less, and not more stuff. Less space, less content, smaller screens.
Design now must be neat, straight foward. We must be good at taking the right stuff off, and not at occupying the pixels on the screen.

960 still rules for me. If you use grid system generator, you can input desired gutter width and download the template.

http://www.gridsystemgenerator.com/gs01.php

I believe it depends on how much content you have. Many sites don’t need to use 960px or 978px for the width.

I feel this grid system is so out dated not even funny.. I have used my css files to move all my content around .This is a poor mans way of design! I vote dump this old crap and move on to new ideas.

Great article. I really appreciated it tremendously. Having a very difficult time deciding on revising the width of our website which was apparently using a 960GS which I was unaware of at the time. I was disappointed to see that others seemed to have just a little more real estate regarding width. I was about to do a redesign to get me towards 990 until I read this article and even hesitate on the 978GS.

I use a 7″ reader, which is becoming a very popular standard. Many netbooks have 10″ screens and have 1024×768 resolution. Now you can increase the resolution to 2048×1536 in a year or two but for a portable device, the physical dimensions really need to stay around 9-11″ max. While the text will be crisper, the viewing area really cannot be much larger than what 960 provides at the standard DPI. 978 is just a bit too small on my 7″ screen, even if the pixel density becomes greater. The 960GS is about as small as it can go until trying to click on text links just doesn’t work well.

If you’re curious, this is my legal advice website that I’ve had up for quite a while. You can compare the others. Our leading competitor is sticking with 960GS while the other uses the 978GS that looks nice on my big monitor but not so great on the 7″ reader and not great on the netbook which we place the taskbar on the side to maximize the vertical viewing area. Just some thoughts on compatibility. Perhaps the 960GS is still optimal for all purposes even if it is a tad tighter.

14% of users who have 1024×768 screens (Jan 2012), by choice or not, will have to scroll horizontally.

The Web evolves and you need to use it, Intel provided speed in their CPU’s & MS & others used the speed.

I design for the current overwhelming 85% of browsers that are higher than 1024×768.

Its how we make it better! Those stuck in the past will wonder why the sites looks rubbish, and realise that they have a cac browser. Its not rocket science!

Those who don’t have a choice (company etc..) can pester their boss.. Simple.

The 960 grid system works great for us at the moment but that is because a lot of our clients are still using 17″ CRT monitors. Now they are still using that because A)Small Rural Communities B)Farmers C)Just don’t know what they are missing.

Because of this the 960 grid works great especially with how easy it is to maneuver blocks around when you do shrink a website for mobile devices. Mobile is the new web, people are wanting all their content delivered on their iPad’s, Xoom’s, etc.

Woops, forgot the website. 1080.gs. Enjoy!

This grid system is also great and generates PSD files: http://gridcalculator.dk/#/978/12/30/0.

I also agree that 960 is getting small, but also think that small (or “responsive” is the new trend nowadays. If it was hard thinking of websites for a variable width in the past, now we have to get used to creating websites for all kinds of widths now, with more and more conditionals depending on screen size.

Hope it helps!
Cheers,
jw

For me the big issue is having clients that don;t fully understand the importance of content and write it off as something useless…god knows why, but, using a larger width for me means WAY to much whitespace half of the time so 960 is perfect. On the other hand, for personal things, i prefer 978, i find it is a little more asthetically pleasing (to me) with a little more space between multiple elements…So i suppose, the proper answer for me is it is dependent on the project…

The 960GS is still the best. Though today websites come with higher fonts or people use higher resolutions, this 960 system will fit into any kind of client browsers. It is good for web designer as well as browsers.

You’re asking the wrong question. Ask for yourself, does a regular computer user have a monitor as big as ours for higher resolutions or not. That’s really the only thing you are addressing about 960gs.

As a graphic designer turned web designer/ developer over the last 3 years… it seems to me there are too many –“standard rules”– when it comes to the layout… this is in response to many of the comments I’ve read on here (everyone seems extremely old-school)… Basically, the way I look at it, as long as the width is less than 1000px and more than 950px… who cares! this whole talk about standard column width and 12 column, 16 column is garbage. My #content and #sidebars are measured by the old eyeball, and what looks good to me, depending on the type of literal content I’m working with… I don’t know, maybe I’m just weird ;)

Guys, there is NO standard, period. It’s up to each developer making a decision based on the clients need to set what width, font-size, text spacing, line-spacing, etc., that needs to be used. If a developer wants to use a fixed width, that is his standard. Personally, I am using the 960 grid system and will continue until the worldwide stats on browser display resolutions gives me the feedback that I need to move to a larger grid system. The one thing I have learned in my years on the internet, since the beginning, is that nothing stays the same for very long. :)

Why is 990 not mentioned? I think its best to try to make the most of a 1024px width, the wider the better, with a small gap either side, so 990px fits nicely leaving enough room for the vertical scrollbars without the horizontal ones appearing.

responsive design solves everything. grids are still useful but the really great sites just shift infinitely no matter how big or small.

Looking to downloaded the 960gs template to retro-fit a micro site into a pre-existing 960px site I came across this thread and thought I’d chime in. I feel that 960 sites tend to look a bit dated in today’s webspace and bumping them up to 978 isn’t going to change that (though we must acknowledge that this is an old post). That being said, to the comments above which herald the end of grids, grid based design has been around long before websites and, thankfully, will be around long into the responsive future.

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