Insight On Responsive Web Design

By Author: fat mama
Total Articles: 7
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Responsive Webdesign is not another new web technology rather a new revolutionary approach to the way designers around the world have been accustomed to designing web content.

Anybody, and that is not necessarily just designers, who have tried accessing web content over different devices and browsers will have definitely encountered the inconsistency in the experience that the web content delivers when shifting from one device to the other or, for that matter, even from one browser to the next.

What is RWD?

RWD (an acronym for responsive webdesign), a smartly coined term, is actually what it literally means – to respond to the environment that the content is being accessed from and to do the needful to deliver the consistent user experience independent of the accessing device type or browser. In simple terms, this means that if a web page is displaying itself in a certain fashion on a desktop, it would display in the same fashion on wide-screen laptop, or an iPhone, or any other devices that the fast paced technology throws across as a challenge to the designer time and again.

First introduced ...
... just a couple of years ago, RWD is still in its fundamental development stages and primarily attempts to incorporate CSS3, media queries, flexible or fluid grids dependent on percentages rather than numbers for their respective sizes, fluid type, fluid video, and fluid images.

Keeping it Flexible

When working for RWD the key focus is to keep everything that is used on the web page flexible. This addresses two primary concerns of designers. Firstly, flexibility releases you from being limited by content length and secondly, the more important issue, a flexible webdesign holds visual representation together across many more devices. For any designer feeling the grind of re-customization or adaptation for different devices this comes like a boon. The single design is extendable to multiple devices through the design approach of RWD.

Fluid Grids

Mostly any RWD is built on a solid foundation of what is being called as fluid grids. In brief fluid grids have their content sizes defined in proportion to the container that displays the particular content. In other words, fluid grid designs take into account not only the desired size of the content but also incorporate scaling by simply maintaining the proportional size of the content and the container. For example, let Target be the display container and Context be the elements contained within it. By the simple equation:

Target ÷ Context = Result

The proportional display size is the Result that can be directly incorporated into CSS. Just by maintaining these proportions it becomes possible to deliver consistency to the user.

Over the years, there has been an explosion of browser-enabled devices in the market including e-readers, tablets, gaming consoles, notebooks, and smartphones. Each ships with its own screen resolution, browser, layout and orientations. Though still an “in-formulation” stage concept, responsive webdesign definitely looks promising to deliver scalability and expansion.

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