Responsive design

December 26, 2012

Ethan Marcotte first introduced the idea of responsive design in May 2010 to a wider audience through an A List Apart article. I read the article but it was not until I heard Ethan discuss it with Jeffrey Zeldman on The Big Web Show that it really got my attention. As I listened, I was convinced that this was the future of building websites. I was excited but also a bit uneasy as most people are when presented new ideas and new ways of thinking about something that you are so used to doing a certain way.

On the ground level, not much changed in building websites, it was business as usual in the places that I worked. Most of the work that embraced Ethan’s ideas were personal websites. Being more of a pragmatist, I wanted to know more about how to build a site in this way. Responsive design was still very much an idea without a lot of examples or roadmaps to learn from. I heard that Ethan was going to write a book and I eagerly looked forward to it becoming a reality.

The book was released in June of 2011 and I consumed it in a day. It was very practical and helped me to develop a better framework of what this new way of building websites could be like. But in the everyday world of my job, I was still building fixed-width designs and did not have a chance to put it into practice. It was also a time in my life when I had very little interest in doing side projects in my “spare” time. I had 3 young kids and other interests that I wanted to explore when I was not at work.

In July, I got the chance to hear Ethan talk about responsive design at the Front-End Design Conference. He talked about some real-life examples of the challenges of implementing this new way of thinking as he was a part of the redesign of The Boston Globe’s site. He could not show us specific examples because the Globe project did not launch until September.