We use them everyday, be it handheld or atop a desk. My Creative Monologue this time discusses the positive and negative sides of screen development, and how we are using them for videos, websites and UI. Let’s have a deeper chat about the thing you are using to read this.

In 2009, LG Electronics had a marketing game plan. One of its phones sold three years before catapulted the company to new record sales, and it aims to ride on that wave with a new model. The phone in question? New Chocolate (or its less fancy model number BL40). Whether they had the foresight to see the phone will not remain new is beyond me. But sure, it’s proof of an attempt to distinguish it from the original iteration of the Chocolate.

Promotions for the phone were done with great fanfare, featuring K-pop stars such as Girls’ Generation and f(x) in advertising campaigns. They had the ladies singing, dancing, and modelling the phone with flare and finesse. All of this was filmed into music videos that have an aspect ratio of 21:4. That is, uncoincidentally, also the dimension of the screen size featured on the New Chocolate.

However, watching these music videos on a computer screen or on any other phone presented challenges. The awkward width-height combination caused screens other than the New Chocolate to not fully occupy the viewing area, leaving viewers to watch the video on these devices with black borders in full-screen mode.

From Shapes to Screen Maximalist

We saw a creative outpouring during the 2000s, where manufacturers heavily manipulated the form factors of phones to gain an edge in a burgeoning mobile market. Technological advancements catalysed the rapid release of new models and shapes. Along with these modifications came changes in screen sizes.

During this time, the full capabilities of internet browsing and show-bingeing on a phone were not yet realised. As a result, the screen wasn’t prioritised as much in these earlier devices. But this also allowed for more flexibility in phone designs. With the primary purpose of these devices being for calling and texting, the form could rapidly switch from rectangular to round, and anything in between.

Tactile buttons, sliders, and pivoting cameras were just some of the features that were incorporated into phone design during this era. However, a gradual “blanding” of smartphones led to the demise of these unique features and a shift towards a more consistent, slate-like form.

As we continue to navigate the phenomenon of screen standardisation in more recent times, the focus on the creation of new technology has however shifted towards having more screens for more watching and browsing. This has led to the development of new products such as long, curved monitors, foldable phablets, and the Aurora 7, a laptop with seven monitors that can be folded for storage or use. Despite efforts to innovate within these new constraints, LG was not able to succeed in this area.

Upright, or The Other Way?

Fast forward to the present, and we see that LG has dissolved its mobile division due to intense competition. They ceased phone production in 2020, with their last model being called the Wing. The screen on this model is closer to a standard, contemporary smartphone, but with a unique feature. When held vertically, the Wing can be swivelled up to a landscape orientation. A secondary display is revealed beneath, which remains unrotated. This allows the user to have more screen space and use the primary display horizontally to watch movies while holding the device with only one hand using the second screen.

Smartphones have gradually become ubiquitous and now compete with computers in terms of usage frequency. With the natural use of holding a smartphone vertically, social media platforms like Snapchat and TikTok have led to an increase in portrait mode footage. Music videos are not immune to this trend, although they are produced more as an alternative rather than overtaking the popularity of horizontally-filmed content.

The struggle between horizontal and vertical orientation is an ongoing issue. Putting a movie trailer on TikTok would mean cropping away a portion of the video. Uploading Instagram live footage to YouTube will show black bars when viewed in full screen on a computer.

While the LG Wing aims to address this issue through its swivel feature, it’s just one design among the 24,000 other Android devices available on the market. It would be more practical for a video maker to upload cropped footage, rather than expecting a TikTok user to rotate their phone to watch a horizontal video, let alone a movie advertisement.

Despite some progress in standardising screen resolutions across devices, video orientation compatibility has become a new challenge we face.

Between Style, Nostalgia, and Practicalities

The slowing of changes in screen size can seem surprising, given that film (and later, TV) have always involved tinkering with video dimensions since their inception in the 19th century. Modern filmmakers also use these fluctuations to evoke historicity and nostalgia by depicting a scene in the dimensions that were popular at the time. What begins as a limitation becomes a tool for film design. The same can also be said about phone camera photography — consider how Instagram first started as a platform for sharing square-shaped photos in imitation of polaroids.

Beyond aesthetics, it isn’t good for videos, images, websites, and user interfaces (UIs) to continually adapt to new sizes and orientations. While designers are trying to increase flexibility in these areas, the tendency for a UI or website to break also remains a problem. Highlighting the positives of responsive web design, UX consultant Vitaly Friedman however admits: “Responsive web design is a mere concept that when implemented correctly can improve the user experience, but not completely solve it for every user, device, and platform.” Such variables can also reduce the visibility of certain visual information and/or add confusion for the user.

Seeing the Future

Reflecting on early mobile phone development, we may see the lack of large screens as a hindrance to progress. However, people in the past may not have viewed it that way. They likely had a more positive, utopian perspective, viewing the phones they owned as symbols of freedom. The lack of knowledge of new developments in mobile design did not hinder their enjoyment of using them. Screen size was not a problem at that time.

If we adopt this same mindset in the present, we may see our smartphones and computers as even more limiting. Who knows, perhaps a century from now people will be unrestricted by a panel, and their user interface will be projected as holograms in the air. People in the year 3008 might be laughing at us for holding palm-sized devices to communicate.

VR headsets have already begun to hint at a more unrestricted and peripheral-inclusive way of using technology. If this becomes the new standard for “screen resolution,” what will become of the hard work that UI/UX designers have done for mobile optimisation? Will it come full circle, with people complaining about the small screen size of a video taken from TikTok? Will they try to crop and resize it to fit the entire field of view of the goggles? Will there still be a fight for dominance between portrait and landscape orientation, or will that be seen as an outdated problem?

Your Whole Sight is a Screen (of Ads)

Imagine people taking selfies with projected hologram smartphones to experience historical social cultures. Or someone using a VHS camcorder to add a vintage touch to their movie screenplay in a virtual theatre. The use of simulated screens within larger screens reflects the different windows that are scattered on our desktops or apps viewed in split screens on our phones.

Eliminating the boundaries of a physical screen allows for every inch of our eyes to be prime real estate for a borderless video to appear. Websites can now hover anywhere in front of us as we release our hands from holding anything. We can choose the size of a website, video, or app, which means more responsive capabilities will have to be built as well.

The extended visual digital space holds great potential, but it also brings up new problems to examine and scrutinise. As it proliferates from one service to another, we may see an augmented future filled with targeted, unsolicited ads appearing in the corners of our eyes. It will become more pervasive than ever before, maybe as overwhelming as Asian street signs.

The Wayforward Machine also criticises the future of internet privacy and the potential lack of “free and open access to knowledge on the web.” Along with this, we may be facing an increase in pop-ups and related dark patterns invading our screens, as if that hasn’t been a reality already.

Conclusion

We love our screens, and we want more of them. We also want a frictionless and innovative way of using them, so that we can emulate historical limitations for fun. Every new screen resolution we produce becomes another frame of reference for us to relive a period, mock, and talk about.

As we move towards a seamless experience with screens or better, radical technology, we must also prepare for new problems, like potential exploitations within them. And let’s not talk about cracking them on the floor from butter fingers.

For now, let us crop videos or rotate our phones like a commoner in 2023.