A Responsive Way Forward
Responsive design hasn’t made things easier, has it? The flourishing diversity of web landscape — from form factors to connection types to input modes to browsers — has only amplified the unpredictability of user experiences on the web. This unpredictability is remarkably difficult to tackle unless you embrace the inherent fluidity of the web as a guiding principle in your work. In many cases, going responsive seems like the most reasonable strategy for covering the entire spectrum of user experiences, ranging from tiny viewports to ultra-wide HD screens, with a wonderfully convenient, and often deceptively sneaky one-codebase-for-everything approach.
We’ve learned by now that responsive design is much more than that. Responsive design affects everything and everybody in the design process, and in practice, more often than not, a few media queries, fluid grids and flexible images just aren’t enough. Screen considerations alone aren’t enough either. We have to entirely rethink and relearn our design practices, tools and processes, adapt new technologies and break down complexity of UI components, deal with performance issues and hostile rendering environments and apply content choreography to keep priorities and structure intact.
As a result, the craft of designing and building websites has become complex and elaborate, often difficult to estimate, test and support; and it seems that everybody is still trying to figure out just the right techniques within just the right design workflow to create fast, scalable and flexible design systems. Responsive design ain’t easy, but it doesn’t mean that it has to be difficult — if you have a good process in place, with a knowledgeable team, and a versatile set of reliable design patterns.
When we set out to create this book, we wanted to explore just that: design workflows, front-end techniques, UX strategies and design patterns that would help web designers and developers get better results, faster. The result lies in your hands now: a compendium of techniques, strategies and patterns that work well in real-life responsive designs — written by well-respected designers and developers spending every day crafting and maintaining responsive websites on both small and large scales. Think of it as a handbook with practical guidelines and precise pointers that will help you tackle any level of complexity in responsive design, intelligently and efficiently.
As you can see, the book isn’t particularly small, and we hope that you’ll discover quite a few useful gems in here. All links mentioned in the book are also collected on www.smashing-links.com. We hope that by the time you flip over the last page, you’ll feel empowered to craft accessible, fast and flexible responsive websites that will stand the test of time and unpredictability — whatever devices come next. Happy reading!
Vitaly, editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine