Responsive Design

The concept that launched a thousand site redesigns. For years, web designers have coveted print for its precision layouts, lamenting the varying user contexts on the web that compromise their designs. Responsive design advocates that we shift our design thinking to make a virtue of these constraints. Using fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries to embrace the ebb and flow of the web.

• Can Email Be Responsive?

  by Jason Rodriguez · Issue 395 ·May 13, 2014

  Love it or hate it, there’s no denying the popularity of HTML emails. And, like the web before it, the inbox has officially gone mobile, with over 50 percent of email opens occurring on mobile devices. Still, email design is an outrageously outdated practice. (Remember coding before web standards became… standards?) But coding an email doesn’t need to be a lesson in frustration. While email designers still have to build layouts using tables and style them with HTML attributes and—gasp!—inline styles, a number of intrepid designers are taking modern techniques pioneered for the web and applying them to the archaic practice of email design. Jason Rodriguez shows how to apply the principles of responsive web design to the frustrating but essential realm of email design.

• Look at the Big Picture

  by Lyza Danger Gardner ·May 08, 2014

  It’s easy to see that automation can streamline image-optimization for all the varied contexts on the pan-device web. What’s harder to imagine is a future where foregrounding meaningful content in images can be handled by an algorithm. Art direction still requires human intervention, and that’s often a luxury in high-production environments.

• Content-out Layout

  by Nathan Ford · Issue 392 ·March 25, 2014

  Grids serve well to divide up a predefined canvas and guide how content fits onto a page, but when designing for the web’s fluid nature, we need something more responsive. Enter ratios, which architects, sculptors, and book designers have all used in their work to help set the tone for their compositions, and to scale their material from sketch to final build. Designers can apply a similar process on the web by focusing on the tone and shape of our content first, then working outward to design fluid, ratio-based grid systems that invite harmony between content, layout, and screen. Nathan Ford takes the next step toward more sophisticated, content-focused layouts on the web.