Project 2:
Responsive Design & Business Web Site Research

• Responsive Page •

responsive

What is Responsive Web Design?

In 2007, when the iPhone coming-out extravaganza took place. Steve Jobs was eager to show the audience how users could use the web browser. Using his fingers he pinched to zoom and swiped to scroll the screen as part of the browsing experience. Until this unveiling, responsive websites did not exist.

Responsive Web design is the approach that suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation.

The practice consists of a mix of flexible grids and layouts, images and an intelligent use of CSS media queries. As the user switches from their laptop to iPad, the website should automatically switch to accommodate for resolution, image size and scripting abilities. In other words, the website should have the technology to automatically respond to the user’s preferences. This would eliminate the need for a different design and development phase for each new gadget on the market.

Images are, without a doubt, the most important element of information used by web designers. And although the web is now some 25 years old, pictures are still stubbornly fixed: their size, format, and crop, all set in stone by a single •src•. Images have been the obstacle to implement adaptable responsive pages, pages that scale both up and down, tailoring themselves to both the constraints and context at hand. The new •picture• specification includes features for these cases. This design approach is called “Fluid and Variable Sized Image”.