Responsive Web Design just got Easier with the Responsive Grid System How To Choose The Right Grid It’s easy enough to understand how grids are helpful in organizing your content. Not as easy is deciding what type of grid best suits your content and how to build it. Here’s how I made decisions about what grid to use for the redesign of this site. You may remember in redesign this site I created documents filled with design decisions that later became an online style guide. This post will focus more on my design choices for selecting a typographic grid, what I was looking for and how I made the decision to use the grid that’s in place. Setting a Constraint for the Grid Layout Prior to making any grid choices, I had a few thoughts about what I wanted from the layout. In his book, Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design (a book I highly recommend by the way), Khoi Vihn talks about the constraints one might use to begin developing a grid. In print, the fixed dimensions of the page offer the constraint. Trial and Error Baseline Grid Breaking Out of the Grid Summary Grids are good.
Responsive template generator Columnal | A responsive CSS grid system helping desktop and mobile browsers play nicely together. Using CSS flexible boxes - CSS The CSS3 Flexible Box, or flexbox, is a layout mode intended to accommodate different screen sizes and different display devices. For many applications, the flexible box model is easier than the block model since it does not use floats, nor do the flex container's margins collapse with the margins of its contents. Many designers find the flexboxes easier to use than boxes. Popular layouts can thus be achieved more simply and with cleaner code. Flexible Boxes Concept The defining aspect of the flex layout is the ability to alter its items' width and/or height to best fit in the available space on any display device. Block layout is vertically-biased; inline layout is horizontally-biased. Flexible Boxes Vocabulary Instead of talking about horizontal (inline) and vertical (block), flexible boxes use the terms main axis and cross axis. Flex container The parent element in which flex items are contained. Flex item Each child of a flex container becomes a flex item. Axes Directions Lines Dimensions
Grid System Generator 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. 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. Many people trying to use GGS were also confused by the lack of predefined code for working with the grid.
The Semantic Grid System: Page Layout For Tomorrow Advertisement CSS grid frameworks can make your life easier, but they’re not without their faults. Fortunately for us, modern techniques offer a new approach to constructing page layouts. But before getting to the solution, we must first understand the three seemingly insurmountable flaws currently affecting CSS grids. Problems Problem #1: They’re Not Semantic The biggest complaint I’ve heard from purists since I created The 1KB CSS Grid two years ago is that CSS grid systems don’t allow for a proper separation of mark-up and presentation. Floated elements must also be cleared, often requiring unnecessary elements to be added to the page. <div class="grid_3"> 220 </div><div class="grid_9"> 700 </div><div class="clear"></div> Problem #2: They’re Not Fluid While CSS grids work well for fixed-width layouts, dealing with fluid percentages is trickier. But when .grid_3 appears inside of a .grid_6 cell, the percentages must be recalculated. Problem #3: They’re Not Responsive Blame It On The Tools