More on wallpaper resolutions

For my recent Escaflowne wallpaper, I decided to try a different approach to the issue of cropping for various monitor resolutions. Usually I design an image as widescreen, and then crop off the sides to fit 4x3 and 5x4 monitors. This is not a very good solution, as this often means nice details are in danger of getting cropped. This time around I tried to overlay the 3 different resolutions, so the widescreen gets a little cropped off the top and bottom, and the 5x4 gets a little cropped off the sides, but this way less is cropped total.
What do I mean?

[Note: this was an in-progress version of the wallpaper in Illustrator, back when I thought I'd make it predominantly blue.]
I think I shall use this method from now on.

What's in a resolution?

Wallpaper resolution is a tricky thing. There are so many different sizes of monitors out there nowadays that it's hard to design for all of them. Generally, you just crop things to the right aspect ratio, which does mean you have to be careful about element placement.
I have a dual widescreen monitor display at work, and generally speaking, this is a rare thing to find. So every so often I make one for myself.
The question was, how do I make this wall look good on dual screens and single screens?
The answer: Move elements around.
I made two wallpapers here: a dual monitor version, and a single monitor version, and then cropped them to fit the relevant aspect ratios.
Dual monitor versions:




Single monitor versions:




It makes a difference, doesn't it?

Screen size statistics

I've been using Google Analytics for several months now, and one of the most fascinating things I've learned about my site visitors is how many people still use relatively small monitors.
50% of my visitors use 1024x768. This doesn't surprise me, I know this is still the most common resolution.
20% of my visitors use 1280x1024, which is the same resolution I use at home. The increasing popularity of LCDs which tend to be of the 5x4 ratio explains this fairly well.
Surprisingly, a solid 8% of my users are on 800x600. This is the third most common resolution of DA!'s visitors. There's a reason why we're still told to make sure our designs fit in 800x600 screens at work. That's 1 out of every 12 visitors to my site!
In a graphics-savvy community where 1280x1024 is considered small, people still need to remember: design your website for the least common denominator -- the 800x600 crowd. They're still a sizable portion of the internet at large.
(This of course means nothing about designing wallpapers; design them as large as you feel like, for sizing down will leave less artifacting on the image than sizing up.)
As a final note, widescreen resolutions are growing in popularity as well - a bit over 10% of DA!'s visitors use a widescreen (16x10) resolution.