Code: Responsive Web Design

This is an excerpt from Scott Jehl’s book Responsible Responsive Design. 2014, A Book Apart.

Chapter 1: Responsible Design

“My love for responsive centers around the idea that my Web site will meet you wherever you are—from mobile to full-blown desktop and anywhere in between.”—Trent Walton, “Fit to Scale”

Responsive design’s core tenets—fluid grids, fluid images, and media queries—go a long way toward providing a holistic package for cross-device interface design. But responsive design itself relies on features that may not work as expected—or at all. Our sites need to react to unexpected user behaviors, network conditions, and unique support scenarios.

In this chapter, we’ll dig into two responsible tenets: usability and accessibility. We’ll cover higher-level considerations before getting into nitty-gritty code you can implement now and expect to last. To start, let’s talk design. Read More

This is a sample chapter from the Second Edition of Chris Ward’s book Jump Start Responsive Web Design. 2017 SitePoint.

Chapter 4: Responsive Text

If Web pages are to be truly responsive, then the content of pages should also flow and change to suit the dimensions of the device a user is viewing it on. While Web pages are becoming more image and media heavy, text is still a crucial component, and there are numerous techniques to help make it as readable as possible, no matter the current device.

To understand better the ways you can represent text on a Web page, it’s best to take a trip into the long history of text. Read More

This is a sample chapter from Karen McGrane’s book Going Responsive. 2015, A Book Apart.

Chapter 4: Clean Up Your Content

“The responsive design became a content solution and not just a technical solution to make the ongoing evolution of our digital products more robust.”—Alex Breuer, the Guardian

Fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries: nothing in the definition of Responsive Web Design (RWD) says anything about your content. And yet, a lasting benefit for many organizations comes from the process of cleaning up and paring down content.

It probably comes as no surprise that creating a good user experience across all devices means presenting less content, better content, and more thoughtfully prioritized content. Gone are the days when we could assume that users want—and look at—everything we cram onto the page and shove into the right column. Truth is, users never wanted all that dreck. Now, with smaller screens, we’re forced to acknowledge that uncomfortable truth and make decisions about what really matters. Read More