Techniques, Tools, and Design Strategies for Responsive Web Design

 Responsive design continues to receive a lot of attention, but given how different it is from the "usual" way of  Web Designing Assignment Help websites, it can be intimidating for those who haven't tried it yet.

To that end, we've put together this set of responsive website design tools. Tutorials, strategies, posts, software, and more are all included, all aimed at providing you with the basic information you need to build your own responsive designs.

Techniques for Responsive Design

Media Queries and CSS Transitions Elliot is a fictional character. Jay Stocks explains how to use CSS media queries and CSS transitions together. The basic idea is that you use media queries to build responsive websites that adapt in layout based on window width, and you constantly resize your browser to see how the website works, but any time a question kicks in, there's a sharp jump between the first and second styles. Why not smooth the transformation by animating the resize with some quick CSS transitions? This is an excellent case study.

Tables with Responsive Data For viewing data tables, Chris Coyier and Scott Jehl are experimenting with responsive design techniques. By default, data tables are very large, and this is unavoidable. While you could zoom out to see the whole table, the text would be too tiny to read. You might enlarge it to make it more readable, but you'd have to scroll both vertically and horizontally to access the table (sad face). One option is to reformat the table to make it easier to read. Another option is to make a pie graph out of the results. Another choice is to convert the table into a mini-graphic for use on small screens (rather than interfering much with the content when the full table is displayed).

Responsive Design Tools

You can build a responsive design from scratch, or you can use some of the tools listed below to speed up and smooth out the process.

Respond.js Scott Jehl’s fast and lightweight polyfill for min-width and max-width CSS3 media queries (for IE 6 to 8 and more). css3-mediaqueries-js is another script that enables IE 5+, Safari 2 and Firefox 1+ to transparently parse, test and apply CSS3 media queries.

WebPutty: Scientific Progress CSS Editing This tool is a Web-based CSS editor with auto-save feature and a real-time preview of your website. WebPutty also has CSS selector highlighting and SCSS support (for Sass and LESS), as well as Compass support. To use the tool, just embed a link tag at the end of your website’s head tag.

Responsive Design Templates

320 and Up 320 and Up works on the “tiny screen first” principle, whereby designs are created for mobile screens first, and then expanded for tablets, desktops, and large screens. It works well as an extension to HTML5 Boilerplate and as a standalone kit.

Media Queries for Standard Devices Here is a useful template for media queries for standard devices: empty placeholders for targeting devices and attributes that you might be interested in when making responsive designs.

Responsive Design Frameworks

1140 CSS Grid 1140 CSS Grid is optimized to work on screens ranging from the size of mobiles to 1280 pixels wide. It’s a simple flexible grid system that uses media queries for smaller screens, essentially stacking columns on top of one another.

Responsive Design Workflow And Strategies

The Responsive Designer’s Workflow Luke Wroblewski’s conference notes on Ethan Marcotte’s presentation about applying responsive Web design principles and workflows to the redesign of a major newspaper website. Among other things, Ethan explains how he approaches the responsive design methodology, what the design process looks like and how prototyping is done in the context of responsive design.

Discussions And Points Of View On Responsive Design

While not tutorials per se, the articles here give you valuable insight into why you should use responsive design techniques (and when you maybe shouldn’t use them).

Responsive by Default Andy Hume explains what in his opinion responsiveness is all about. It’s what a website does when it’s loaded into an unknown browser on an unknown device by an unknown individual. It’s “how you deal with “the most hostile software development environment ever imagined” (via Douglas Crockford). Like progressive enhancement it’s a strategy that frees you to work with the web rather than fight against it.” An interesting point of view.

Further Resources

Here are some additional resources for creating responsive designs that don’t fit neatly into the categories above.

Media Queries A growing collection of websites that use media queries.