24 Ways to be Responsive
24 Ways is a web design/development blog that deliver fantastic articles ranging from web strategy to design ideas to development techniques making it the perfect advent calendar for anyone working in the web.
This year it is no surprise that they’ve ended up with a huge focus on the responsive nature of web design, and there are some absolute cracking reads to be had.
In this article we’re going to take a look at the responsive articles so that you can quickly find the article that you want to find out more information about.
Responsive Responsive Design
The first of the responsive articles on 24ways came from the very smart Tim Kadlec. You may know Tim from his very well written book released earlier in the year “Implementing Responsive Design“.
Tim focusses on the performance side of Responsive Design, something which has gone missing in a lot of the recent responsive implementations. He talks about conditional loading, warns about being careful with images and lists a great idea from Steve Sounders when approaching new functionality to an existing site:
- Optimize an existing feature or asset on the page
- Remove an existing feature or asset from the page
- Don’t add the new feature or asset
Should We Be Reactive?
Dan Donald takes a look at the evolution of web design and looks at how although the web was once responsive (text on a page sans CSS is pretty responsive), it is now coming full circle.
He is taking a look at making the web react to the user and their context, which is what a lot of people have mistaken responsive design when they decide to go down that path. Too many people concern themselves with things like “Well on the ipad the user will be looking to do XYZ, but on the iPhone they will be on the move looking to do….”, and it’s a dangerous path to go down with RWD alone.
Dan looks at how we might introduce so reactiveness into the mix to hopefully fill in the missing link.
Responsive Images: What We Thought We Needed
Paul Robert Lloyd has recently shared his thoughts in our Responsive Design Interview Series, and in this article he goes through the Responsive Image saga.
He looks in details at the <picture> and srcset approaches to responsive images.
Rather than side with one or the other his point is that we need a better image format, not more or changed markup. He also shows that the size of the display is not always tied directly to the size of the image, demonstrating an example whereby the images on an tablet are larger than those on the desktop which are in turn smaller than those on a mobile.
It’s a great article to lead us into a responsive images new year.
More more, gimme more
Rather than go through all of them individually you should now see that these articles are individual works of brilliance. Be sure to also check out:
- Design Systems by Laura Kalbag
- Redesigning the Media Query by Les James
- Giving Content Priority with CSS3 Grid Layout by Rachel Andrew
- Infinite Canvas: Moving beyond the page by Nathan Peretic
I highly recommend reading every one of the 24 Ways articles, but if that’s too much the links listed here are an absolute must.
A big thank you to Drew McLellan, Brian Suda, Anna Devenham and Owen Gregory and all the writers for putting together such an amazing online publication.
