The Goldilocks Approach to Responsive Web Design

Foundation: HTML Templates News or Magazine This template puts a focus on bold images, perfect for a magazine style site with eye catching content. Your stories are easy to find with large feature blocks. See Demo Real Estate or Travel Big thumbnails with a space for captions and descriptions along with an informative header make this the perfect template for real estate or hotel booking. See Demo Ecommerce Homepage Building an online store? See Demo Agency Bring your work to the forefront with this sleek template that's perfect for agencies or freelancers. See Demo Blog w/ Sidebar Large images, an easy to navigate layout, and versatile sidebar will help you get your blog up and running. See Demo Blog Single Column This sleek, minimal approach can help your blog stand out by putting content front and center. See Demo Portfolio Show off your work and highlight what you do with this grid style thumbnail layout. See Demo Product Page Highlight your new product and educate potential customers with this classic template. See Demo

Centering in the Unknown When it comes to centering things in web design, the more information you have about the element being centered and its parent element, the easier it is. So what if you don't know anything? It's still kinda doable. Not too hard: Known Child If you know the height and width of both the element to be centered and its parent element (and those measurements won't change, i.e. not fluid width environment) one foolproof way to center the element is just to absolute position it with pixel values so it looks perfectly centered. Let's say you know the exact width and height of the element you are centering, but the parent element can change in height and width. You absolutely position the element to be centered and set the top and left values to 50% and the margin top and left values to negative half of the elements height and width. Harder: Unknown Child The hard comes in when you don't know the dimensions of the element to be centered. The grossest way to handle it is literally tables: Share On

CSSHórus | CSS Library for responsive and mobile websites Building a Responsive Layout With Skeleton: Starting Out Dave Gamache's Skeleton Boilerplate provides the perfect foundations upon which to build responsive websites rapidly and reliably. We're going to use Skeleton and build a responsive page based on the Magazine design featured on Webdesigntuts+ recently. We'll be looking at everything from multiple background images, through to media queries, flexible media and mobile-friendly navigation. Let's get started! First Steps In this first video we'll download the Skeleton Boilerplate and prepare our project. Structure and Columns It's time to get stuck into the markup and some styling. We'll also deal with some of the aesthetics by using CSS multiple background images on certain areas. Multiple Background Images Browser support for multiple background images is pretty good, with Mozilla Firefox (3.6+), Safari/Chrome (1.0/1.3+), Opera (10.5+) and even Internet Explorer (9.0+) all cooperating nicely. Additional Resources Here are a few bits and bobs mentioned in the videos so far:

Remove unused CSS - CSS Optimizer Fluid Baseline Grid - A sensible HTML5 and CSS3 development kit The Semantic Grid System Responsive Web Design just got Easier with the Responsive Grid System Golden Grid System GGS was my next step after Less Framework. Instead of a fixed-width grid, it used a fully fluid-width one, without even a maximum width. The resources it was published with are still available on GitHub. The idea was to take a 18-column grid, use the outermost columns as margins, and use the remaining 16 to lay elements out. On smaller screens the 16 columns could be folded into 8, 4 and 2. This behaviour was inspired by Massimo Vignelli's Unigrid system. While the grid's columns were fluid — proportional to the screen's width — the gutters (spaces between the columns) were proportional to the font-size being used. GGS also contained a set of typographic presets, strictly to a baseline grid. Correctly setting all of these measurements is difficult, of course. When published, GGS gained a lot of attention, as the web design community was searching ways to work with fluid-width grids, which have always been troublesome, running counter to many graphic design principles.