Re: Responsive Design

We had briefly talked about this in Advanced Web Development, and I believe Peter Kaiser (prof) said that some web designers were going back and redesigning their sites based on this idea.

I'm not sure if it's any harder or easier, as Rich was asking - I think if it's your standard for designing than that's what you're used to. I'm also not sure about the learning curve - from Jamie's post, it looks like if you have web design down than it would be relatively easy to move in this direction.

Re: Responsive Design

That is really interesting.

The emergence of this type of design structure has become prominent since smart phones have evolved into internet browsers as well.

Responsive Design gives designers and their customers a chance to truly decide on the hierarchy of their website. It forces the client to think about the most important sections in their website and in turn gives the designer a better understanding before considering their final design.

I wonder if designers believe that this makes their job harder since they need to design different versions for multiple platforms and browser sizes or easier because they have been given a better sense of hierarchy by their client.

Re: REsponsive Design

There are a few CSS grid/boilerplate systems that use a fluid grid to create a responsive design down to mobile using media queries. I've used a few of them for some projects, and they work very well, although they require a lot of tweaking depending on the device you are using.

Inuit CSS:
http://csswizardry.com/inuitcss/

Skeleton (my favorite)
http://getskeleton.com/

1140 grid system:
http://cssgrid.net/

They all seem to work in about the same way. When the screen resolution hits a certain point, all of the divs of the grid become the same size and stack on top of each other.
Tablet Portrait: Between 768px and 959px
All Mobile Sizes: Less than 767px
Just Mobile Landscape: Between 480px and 767px
Just Mobile Portrait: Less than 479px

Using media queries, you can add appropriate backgrounds/sectors/etc for all of the sizes.
It is a very interesting way to design once and create a cohesive experience across all of the platforms.

Comic book mastheads

I thought this collection of super lettering might be a good source of inspiration for Rich's movie poster concept.

Re: Responsive Design

Awesome post. I have been curious about the technology behind mobile versus desktop versus tablet websites. I've noticed a fair amount of sites have a "mobile" version of their actual site. But that version is of course used for any screen smaller than a desktop, I would assume. And I also think something in the code or the phones browser tells the site that someone is viewing it from a mobile platform. Aaron, being a more well versed web designer, do you happen to know how this works? Is it a css or java thing?

Re: Responsive Design

You know, ever since I got my iPhone I've wondered how sites know that I'm using an iPhone and not a full size computer. In the past year, I've noticed that most sites I go to on my iPhone are formatted so I can see actually use the site. However, have any of you ever tried going to a local website (like a restaurant) on your smartphones? The page takes FOREVER to load, and it usually isn't formatted properly so it is extremely difficult to navigate. I don't design websites professionally, so I'm not sure about the logistics, but I'm assuming the smaller companies don't have the resources to code their mobile sites properly..?

Re: Responsive Design

Thanks for the resource. It's important to see how designing for mobile is not limited to miniaturizing a site done for a full size web browser but rather to play to the strengths of the screen size.

In advanced web design Peter Kaizer has suggested that a better approach when designing for web is to start with mobile and then build up from there. Fortunately the tools at our disposal today make this far more feasible then even 5 years ago. It adds another wrinkle for designers to contend with but at this point I'm sure we're all used to rolling with punches.