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.

1. Intro to Responsive Web Design
Theory, Approaches and Practices

2. What is Responsive Web Design?
“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.”

3. Content Adaptation Techniques
Server-Side Adaptation - standard for providing the best user
experience; early 2000s
Progressive Enhancement - provide a baseline user experience and
build upon it based on the browser’s capabilities; 2005-2007
Responsive Design - extension of Progressive Enhancement utilizing
CSS3, media queries, fluid content; 2011
Adaptive Design - hybrid approach of server-side and client-side logic
to provide the best user experience; 2013

4. Benefits of Responsive Design
● Single Code Base (Maintainability)
vs. different code bases for desktop / tablet / mobile
● Covers all screen sizes
vs. building specific tiers for “typical” device sizes
● Readability and Usability
vs. resizing / scrolling / panning / zooming
● Search Engine Optimization
vs. different content served for desktop / tablet / mobile

5. Responsive Frameworks
● Twitter Bootstrap
○ 12 column system, spanX widths
● Zurb Foundation
○ zurb example

6. CSS Media Queries
Add the @media tag to your CSS class and specify the width of
the screen in pixels where the following styles should take
affect.
The above line will apply styles when the width of the screen is
equal to or greater than 1024

7. Moving vs. Hiding

8. Moving:
Grid Layout Alterations

9. Hiding:
The Semantic, Responsive Navicon

10. Mobile First
● Old - Graceful Degradation
○ A full, standard website would scale back and gradually remove content and
features as the viewport became smaller and the system would become
simpler
● New - Progressive Enhancement
○ Provide the users with minimal screen real estate and processing power an
amazing experience that both looks great and functions perfectly. As the
need arises, the site can gradually be “enhanced” and even completely
rethought for larger platforms with fewer constraints.

11. Thinking Mobile
● Performance
○ Strip down third-party scripts : Facebook, Google, Twitter
○ Frameworks vs. Reduced/Simple Style Sheets
● RequireJS
○ only download it when you need it
● UglifyJS
● Touch vs. Hover (example)

12. Loading Images & Fonts
Problems:
Performance - why serve high resolution images to your
mobile users?
“Art Direction” - some images don’t scale so well
Solutions??
- CSS3 & web fonts
- SVG & icon fonts
- Picturefill - lightweight JS framework
- HiSRC - jquery plugin
- Foresight.js - JS framework
- Adaptive Images - server-side framework
- Sencha.io - image proxy service (aka TinySrc)
- ReSRC.it - similar to Sencha.io

13. Great Design Paradigms
1. Mostly Fluid
1. Column Drop
1. Left Nav Flyout & Toggle Nav
1. Form
1. Grid

14. Examples of great RWD
● The Boston Globe
● Polygon
● Indochino

15. Responsive Best Practices
1. Breakpoints based on content and site layout &
design, not device.
2. Based on site design, but between 3 and 12
breakpoints typically. Giving versatility to the layout
style.
3. Adaptive loading for images that are better suited to
fit the screen size. (smaller images for a smaller
screen-size)
4. Think ‘mobile first’ and care about performance

16. Sources
http://msdn.microsoft.com/enus/magazine/hh653584.aspx
http://mobiforge.com/starting/story/mobile-webcontent-adaptation-techniques
http://bradfrost.github.io/this-isresponsive/resources.html
http://mobile.smashingmagazine.com/2013/07/08/cho
osing-a-responsive-image-solution/
http://vimeo.com/38947881