Design Trend: Full Screen Backgrounds

One of the bigger challenges with web design is dealing with a medium where the size and quality of the viewing surface is different for everyone. In this respect print is dead simple- everyone is looking at an identical finished piece. We web designers have it much harder- a web design must be able to work for multiple screen sizes and resolutions, from archaic 800x600 monitors to HD cinema displays.

There's always been different techniques for dealing with this. You simply ignore it and use fixed-width designs, or get creative and use repeating backgrounds and floating elements.

One of the more interesting recent trends has to been to use large photography with a bit of trickery to resize that photo to fit varying screen sizes. This gives us a dynamic full-screen look across all sized monitors, with a particular payoff for larger monitors.

We're big fans of this approach. The following are some examples we've come across. Let us know in the comments of any good examples we may have missed.