When I put together my website I decided it was a good opportunity to try out a responsive design. At that point I hadn’t had a client who could be convinced that the small amount of extra effort needed to create a site that would work well on a number of different devices would be beneficial to their business.
I’m really pleased with the results so far, and it looks like the idea of designing to cater for a myriad of screen sizes is now becoming more widespread.
.net magazine did a good round up of articles recently which make good reading for both designers and marketers alike. Vince Allen, senior front-end developer gives out some good advice on lessons he and his team learned at Lot18 when they chose to go responsive when redeveloping their e-commerce site.
Web design agency Upstatement have discovered that a tool usually used in the offline design industry, Adobe InDesign, has proven to be very handy when it comes to setting up templates and master styles for their responsive redesign of the Boston Globe website. It may not suit everyone, but I can certainly see the parallels in employing software that uses a rules-based approach to layout and design. Meanwhile Mat Marquis, from Filament Group, has written an article about the work that he did on the same Boston Globe project, investigating the feasibility of creating responsive images, which had mixed results.
For anyone interested in the practical implications of designing a responsive site, Matt Wilcox has written an article that gives one possible approach for designing responsive websites. Written with graphic designers in mind the article isn’t over-technical and clarifies some of the issues that designers will face when developing for multiple screen sizes.