Death, taxes and milli-Ems. The traumatic shift to proportional… | by Neel Dozome | Nov, 2024


The traumatic shift to proportional measurements systems in digital design

A white plastic Vernier caliper
Photo by Ag PIC on Unsplash

The proliferation of multiple devices with varying screen sizes and resolutions is changing the profession of design. The necessity of creating something in a way that retains consistency without getting bent out-of-shape across divergent display formats is forcing designers to learn new tricks. As Benjamin Franklin observed, other than death and taxes, very few things in life are certain.

However, the kind of responsive design that is the need of the hour because of the uncertainty of screen sizes and resolution is very far from designing for print, where reproduction was about fidelity and identically re-creating an original design within a fixed page size/proportion. Fortunately, there are other certainties other than death and taxes: the speed of light or the ratios that determine the properties of circles and triangles. Without these, proportional adjustment to infinite variations would be an impossible chore.

The second-order problem presented by this technological moment is — how much expertise should designers have in mathematics and computing? Should they be expected to think like developers? Adobe Community expert, Peter Villevoye writes:

Dealing with font sizes and other measurement…



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