Media Queries for Responsive Web Design
Responsive web design is one of the hottest topics among designers and developers right now. If you’re not quite sure what it’s all about, we’ll walk you through what it is, how it works and how CSS media queries are something you need to start incorporating into your own designs. To top it all off, we’ll finish with twenty seriously impressive of responsive designs that use media queries to present experiences specifically catered to different visitors. What Are Media Queries? CSS3 has brought about a ton of fancy visual effects such as shadows and animations, but what about practical improvements?
Designing for a Responsive Web
The web as we know it is changing. In the past, designers and developers only had to concern themselves with one medium: the computer screen. In recent years, however, a plethora of fully internet-enabled devices with scores of different shapes and capabilities have cropped up, meaning that we now have to design our websites to fit comfortably in as many screen sizes, shapes, and resolutions as you can possibly think of. Our old fixed-width layout approach is out of the question now. So what do we do? The answer, my dear reader, lies with Responsive Web Design.
Content Choreography
The concept of permanently placing content on a web page for a single browsing width or resolution is becoming a thing of the past. Media-queried responsive & adaptive sites afford us the ability to re-architect content on a page to fit its container, but with this exciting new potential come equally exciting challenges. Web designers will have to look beyond the layout in front of them to envision how its elements will reflow & lockup at various widths while maintaining form & hierarchy. Media queries can be used to do more than patch broken layouts: with proper planning, we can begin to choreograph content proportional to screen size, serving the best possible experience at any width. As I step into my 3rd responsive project with Paravel, I’ve made a habit out of picking apart media-queried sites I happen across, noting how things get rearranged at various widths. At times, it seems as though all of the site architecture & planning goes out the window as content reflows.
15 Responsive CSS Frameworks Worth Considering
Taking the next step of our responsive layout coverage (we recently published the articles Responsive WordPress Themes and jQuery Plugins to help with Responsive Layouts), today we are taking a look at responsive CSS frameworks that we feel are worth your consideration. Just like most CSS frameworks, all of the frameworks below will help you rapidly develop sites by eliminating the need to write basic CSS styles yourself, as you would expect. But, on top of that, they also come with a responsive layout helping you to quickly and easily create mobile-specific sites. Less Framework 4 The Less Framework contains 4 adaptive layouts and 3 sets of typography presets, all based on a single grid, composed of 68 px columns with 24 px gutters. The idea is to first code the Default Layout (992 px), and then use CSS3 media queries to code several child layouts: 768, 480, and 320 px.
Responsive by default - Blog
If you think about it, responsive layout is not a new thing. Open a simple HTML file in a web browser, and the content automatically adapts to fit the width of that browser. The web is responsive on its own—by default. It's us that's been breaking it all these years by placing content in fixed-width containers.
10 Excellent Tools for Responsive Web Design
By Jason Gross So, you’ve decided to venture into the creation of responsive web designs. Wonderful! With the browsing landscape diversifying into mobile devices, netbooks, desktops and so forth, responsive web designs allow web designers to provide different layouts for specific devices (based on screen size and browser features) giving site visitors an optimal user experience. So now, you’ve determined that it would be beneficial to create responsive web designs.
RWD - Beginners Guide
Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned web professional, creating responsive designs can be confusing at first, mostly because of the radical change in thinking that’s required. As time goes on, responsive web design is drifting away from the pool of passing fads and rapidly entering the realm of standard practice. In fact, the magnitude of this paradigm shift feels as fundamental as the transition from table based layouts to CSS.
Smashing - RWD - Code
Advertisement Almost every new client these days wants a mobile version of their website. It’s practically essential after all: one design for the BlackBerry, another for the iPhone, the iPad, netbook, Kindle — and all screen resolutions must be compatible, too. In the next five years, we’ll likely need to design for a number of additional inventions. When will the madness stop?
RWD Guide
If you’ve been working in the web design field for the past couple of years you should know that designing a fixed interface for a widescreen computer is not enough. Most of the clients you’ll be dealing with from now are going to request that their site is not only desktop-compliant but is also optimized for smartphones and tablets. This issue presents the necessity of working with different screen resolutions in order to guarantee that a website looks good in all sorts of devices. But if the devices’ production continues at the same speed that it has for the past couple of years, the amount of screen resolutions and formats that designers will have to deal with is going to become unbearable.
A List Apart - RWD
The English architect Christopher Wren once quipped that his chosen field “aims for Eternity,” and there’s something appealing about that formula: Unlike the web, which often feels like aiming for next week, architecture is a discipline very much defined by its permanence. Article Continues Below A building’s foundation defines its footprint, which defines its frame, which shapes the facade. Each phase of the architectural process is more immutable, more unchanging than the last.
