Jell-O

What is Jell-O Design?

When you think of Jell-O, consider its properties. It certainly appears liquid at first, but once poured into a mold and chilled, it hardens into a rubbery mass. After it gels, a creative chef may plop it in the center of a dish and garnish it with parsley to make it pretty and more appealing. After that, it may jiggle in the middle, but it still stays put. That is the essence of Jell-O Design. Like Ice, it is frozen in shape, size, and stuck in one spot.

What Spot?

Jell-O Design likes the center. It will always move to the center of a browser window when it is resized. Again, if the design is in a small table, it will be dwarfed on the higher resolution monitors. If the design is in a large table, parts of it will be off the screen on the smaller resolution monitors...but, it will always display in the center! Take a Time-Out to play with resizing a sample page of TTs dropped into a Jell-O mold! Just click on the image.

How Do Ya' Make Jell-O?

Simple. Like Ice Design, you use a fixed width table and wedge all of your design elements inside of the rows and cells you create BUT before you finish, you add center tags in your HTML. It will always remain the size you set and be centered in the browser screen. Any negative white space will be divided evenly on both the left and right sides of the design.

Who Uses It...and Why?

Like Ice Design, Jell-O can be created easily in WYSIWYGs and many web designers (especially beginners) rely heavily on them. The two most popular WYSIWYGs are Dreamweaver and Frontpage. If frozen design is the container for a web site, when to use Jell-O versus Ice falls into the "it depends" stock answer. Some frozen design layouts actually look better if they are centered rather than pushed to the top left of the screen so in those cases that makes Jell-O the right choice.

Mommy Says jell-O is for kids. If you want to be a pro, let that Jell-O go!

Check It Out!

Below are a few examples of Jell-O Design. Although there are not as many Jell-o sites as there are Ice, there are still plenty who opt to use Jell-O Design: