Building a Responsive, Future-Friendly Web for Everyone This week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has seen the arrival of dozens of new devices from tablets to televisions. Some of these newfangled gadgets will soon be in the hands of consumers who will use them to access your website. Will your site work? Or will it end up mangled by a subpar web browser, odd screen size or slow network connection? No one wants to rewrite their website every time a new device or browser hits the web. Even if you aren’t a gadget lover, CES should help drive home the fundamental truth of today’s web — devices, they are a comin’. Basics: Further Reading: Future Friendly — An overview of how some of the smartest people in web design are thinking about the ever-broadening reach of the web: “We can’t be all things on all devices. Techniques:
How to Approach a Responsive Design - Upstatement Blog So I’ve got a confession to make: When we started working on the new Boston Globe website, we had never designed a responsive site before. This shouldn’t come as some huge shock. I mean, raise your hand if you’d built a full responsive site back in November 2010. (You can put your hand down now, Mr. Marcotte, that was rhetorical.) Here at Upstatement, we experimented with how to solve design and layout problems within a responsive framework. Ready? Choose Your Weapon Before laying down a single pixel, there was an important decision to make: What design program to use? Eventually design would be done directly in the browser — there’s no better tool for interactive design, especially when you’re working with fluid layouts (more on all that later). So we lined up the usual suspects from Adobe. Hands down, the answer was InDesign. Even better, InDesign’s internal logic parallels that of web design and development. InDesign stylesheets InDesign’s master pages palette Designing Downward 960px
20 Best Responsive Web Design Examples of 2012 The Boston Globe The largest responsive website to date, The Boston Globe handles loads of content effortlessly, keeping the site intuitive and the content easily accessible on the device of your choice. Smashing Magazine I love this site. Food Sense Clean layout, beautiful photography and playful iconography made me like this site immediately on my first visit. Andersson Wise Type designer, Jan Tschichold once said, ‘Simplicity of form is never a poverty, it is a great virtue.’ Sphero If you haven’t check out Sphero, you should. CSS Tricks It might be the conspicuous green frog that causes me love this site. Grey Goose The Grey Goose site shows that designing responsively does not limit our designs to columns of fluid text and images on solid backgrounds. New Adventures In Web Design With a name like “New Adventures In Web Design,” one would expect a responsive site for this web design conference. Lancaster University Fundraise.com Web Designer Wall Heathlife London & Partners Oliver Russell Fork
Building Responsive Layouts presentation at Responsive Web Design Summit Today I spoke at the online conference Responsive Web Design Summit 2012 on Building Responsive Layouts. I talked about two of the core components of responsive web design: fluid/liquid layouts and media queries. Much of the talk was focused on fluid layout techniques and tips: how to build a basic two- or three-column all-fluid layout, how to create fluid grids with fixed-width margin and padding, how to create a hybrid fixed-fluid layout, and how to calculate nested width, margin, and padding values. I then walked through adding media queries onto the fictional Little Pea Bakery site from my book Stunning CSS3 to demonstrate how to make a layout responsive to a variety of screen sizes and devices. Finally, I covered how to fix media query issues in iOS and IE 8 and earlier. You can view the slides on SlideShare, or download the slides here: Building Responsive Layouts (PDF, 2.4 mb) Responsive web design link hubs Responsive web design articles, tutorials, and tools Mobile viewports
A Responsive Web Design Tutorial for Beginners This is the second post in a series about Responsive Web Design, described in plain language from a front end designer. In our last post I wrote about three reasons responsive web design is something you should know about. We discussed the problems associated with the traditional method of designing a desktop and mobile version of a website. Essentially, there are just too many mobile devices hitting the market to tailor our websites to view well on them all. Nearly every device released has a different screen size and resolution than it’s predecessor. The thing I like about problems or challenges is that–if we let them–they make us better people and create space for innovation and solutions that may otherwise never be discovered. Designer and developer Ethan Marcotte was instrumental in solving this problem of device compatibility. In actuality, the problem is still being solved and responsive web design methods, tools and standards are still being developed and refined. Media Queries
Home | mobiThinking A jQuery responsive images plugin to help ease the transition | Jquery Picture All about the design – top tips for designing mobile sites and apps from the professionals As mobile devices become increasingly capable and the mobile audience becomes increasingly sophisticated, companies are stretching the bounds of possibility when it comes to mobile sites, native applications and Web apps. It becomes all the more important to consider not just graphical design, but also the physical design of your mobile product. It is essential to know not only who will be using it, but how and where they will be using it. This is the fifth in our series of six app-related articles. See also:• Mobile applications: native v Web apps – what are the pros and cons?• What is a mobile Web app? The following guide was compiled from the responses of the following mobile design and usability gurus: All these experts spoke at Design for Mobile in Chicago, USA, September, 2010. The anatomy of good mobile design 1) Putting things in context Understand, respect and design for your users' contexts. 2) The mobile context Mobile means ‘on the go’ and ‘away from my desk’.
A Three Step Guide to Usability on the Mobile Web Designing mobile sites is a different kind of web design. Much like your first experience of designing for the desktop web, it can be both exhilarating and daunting in equal measures. So many possibilities, yet so many usability restrictions. Don't panic, we've been there too. As the guys responsible for maintaining the .mobi top level domain, we work with experts and beginners on a daily basis to help them get the best out of their mobile web strategies. This paper is our "101" guide to getting your design and usability principles right. We'll start by setting some mobile web design rules to live and die by... Five Rules for Designing Usable Mobile Web Sites 1: The mobile web is mobile2: Context is king3: The devices are (very) different4: Forget your dotcom thinking. Rule 1: The Mobile Web is Mobile Never overlook the obvious. Rule 2: Context is King When it comes to usability, context is everything. Rule 3: The devices are (very) different Rule 4: Forget your dotcom thinking. 1. 2. 3. 4.
Responsive Images and Web Standards at the Turning Point The goal of a “responsive images” solution is to deliver images optimized for the end user’s context, rather than serving the largest potentially necessary image to everyone. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been quite so simple in practice as it is in theory. Issue № 351 Recently, all of the ongoing discussion around responsive images just got real: a solution is currently being discussed with the WHATWG. The markup pattern that gets selected stands to have a tremendous influence on how developers build websites in the future. What a long, strange, etc. Let’s go over the path that led us here one more time, with feeling: The earliest discussion of responsive images came about—predictably enough—framed in the context of responsive web design. It’s clear that developers’ best efforts to mitigate these wasteful requests were all doomed to fall short, and not for lack of talent or effort. I covered early efforts in my previous ALA article, so I’ll spare everyone the gruesome details here. 1. 2. Or:
Responsive Menu Concepts The following is a guest post by Tim Pietrusky. I know Tim from his prolific work on CodePen and from being a helpful community member there. He wrote to me with this guest post about responsive menus which I'm more than happy to share with you below. Not only is it a timely concept, but one of the concepts improves upon a clever CSS trick we've covered here in the past. When it comes to responsive design we are faced with various techniques on how to best handle altering our navigation menus for small screens. Three of them are made with pure CSS and one uses a single line of JavaScript. Before We Start In the code presented in this article, I don’t use any vendor-prefixes to keep the CSS easier to see and understand. All menu concepts in this article are based on this simple HTML structure which I call basic menu. To address small screens I use the same media query on all concepts. @media screen and (max-width: 44em) { } 1. This is what it looks like on a small screen with a custom style.
Creating a Mobile-First Responsive Web Design Introduction We're going to walk through how to create an adaptive web experience that's designed mobile-first. This article and demo will go over the following: There is even more up to date responsive guidance on our new Web Fundamentals site. Why we need to create mobile-first, responsive, adaptive experiences How to structure HTML for an adaptive site in order to optimize performance and prioritize flexibility How to write CSS that defines shared styles first, builds up styles for larger screens with media queries, and uses relative units How to write unobtrusive Javascript to conditionally load in content fragments, take advantage of touch events and geolocation What we could do to further enhance our adaptive experience The Need for Adaptivity As the web landscape becomes increasingly complex, it's becoming extremely important to deliver solid web experiences to a growing number of contexts. However, mobile context is much more than just screen size. View the demo Structure Style Less JS
Adaptive Web Design: Crafting Rich Experiences with Progressive Enhancement — Easy Readers The web is an ever-changing medium whose scope, application, audience and platform continue to grow on a daily basis. If you’ve worked on the web for any amount of time, you’ve likely heard or even used the term “progressive enhancement.” Since the term’s inception, it has been considered a best practice for approaching web design. But what is it really? And how do we reconcile its meaning with the rapid evolution of the languages and browsers we rely on to do our jobs? In this brief book, Aaron Gustafson chronicles the origins of progressive enhancement, its philosophy, and mechanisms, and reveals the countless practical ways that you can apply progressive enhancement principles using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.