Whether you’re a beginner or a web professional, creating responsive designs can always be confusing at first, mostly because of the radical change in thinking that’s required. As time goes on, responsive web design is drifting away from the pool of passing fads and rapidly entering the realm of standard practice. In fact, the magnitude of this paradigm shift feels as fundamental as the transition from table based layouts to CSS. Simply put, this is a very different way of designing websites and it represents the future.
Over the past year, responsive design has become quite the hottest topic in the web design community. If all the buzz has you feeling like Rip Van Winkle waking up in the 21st century, this summary will help you catch up with the times.
The Concept Of Responsive Web Design
For many websites, creating a website version for each resolution and new device would be impossible, or at least impractical. Should we just suffer the consequences of losing visitors from one device, for the benefit of gaining visitors from another? Or is there another option? Why should we create a custom Web design for each group of users; after all, architects don’t design a building for each group size and type that passes through it? Like responsive architecture, Web design should automatically adjust. It shouldn’t require countless custom-made solutions for each new category of users.
Obviously, we can’t use motion sensors and robotics to accomplish this the way a building would. Responsive Web design requires a more abstract way of thinking. However, some ideas are already being practiced: fluid layouts, media queries and scripts that can reformat Web pages and mark-up effortlessly (or automatically).
But responsive Web design is not only about adjustable screen resolutions and automatically resizable images, but rather about a whole new way of thinking about design. Let’s talk about all of these features, plus additional ideas in the making.
Fluid Grids
The first key idea behind responsive design is the usage of what’s known as a fluid grid. In recent memory, creating a ‘liquid layout’ that expands with the page hasn’t been quite as popular as creating fixed width layouts; page designs that are a fixed number of pixels across, and then centered on the page. However, when one considers the huge number of screen resolutions present in today’s market, the benefit of liquid layouts is too great to ignore.
Fluid grids go a few steps beyond the traditional liquid layout. Instead of designing a layout based on rigid pixels or arbitrary percentage values, a fluid grid is more carefully designed in terms of proportions. This way, when a layout is squeezed onto a tiny mobile device or stretched across a huge screen, all of the elements in the layout will resize their widths in relation to one another.
Fluid grids are a very important part of creating a responsive design, but they can only take us so far. When the width of the browser becomes too narrow, the design can start to severely break down. For example, a complex three-column layout isn’t going to work very well on a small mobile phone. Fortunately, responsive design has taken care of this problem by using media queries.
Custom Layout Structure
For extreme size changes, we may want to change the layout altogether, either through a separate style sheet or, more efficiently, through a CSS media query. This does not have to be troublesome; most of the styles can remain the same, while specific style sheets can inherit these styles and move elements around with floats, widths, heights and so on.
For example, we could have one main style sheet (which would also be the default) that would define all of the main structural elements, such as #wrapper, #content, #sidebar,#nav, along with colors, backgrounds and typography. Default flexible widths and floats could also be defined.
If a style sheet made the layout too narrow, short, wide or tall, we could then detect that and switch to a new style sheet. This new child style sheet would adopt everything from the default style sheet and then just redefine the layout’s structure.
MEDIA QUERIES
CSS3 supports all of the same media types as CSS 2.1, such as screen, print andhandheld, but has added dozens of new media features, including max-width, device-width, orientation and color. New devices made after the release of CSS3 (such as the iPad and Android devices) will definitely support media features. So, calling a media query using CSS3 features to target these devices would work just fine, and it will be ignored if accessed by an older computer browser that does not support CSS3.
Again, to see a responsive design in action, simply open this article up on a desktop browser and slowly resize the browser to make it thinner. You should see all the page elements adjusting themselves automagically to fit the new width, going all the way down to the size of a mobile browser.
Resources
The W3C specification for CSS3 Media Queries
A great roundup of responsive design techniques via Smashing Magazine