
What exactly
is Responsive Design? The simple answer: Making digital media viewable across all devices and resolutions.
Take your company website, for example. It looks great on your desktop computer, right? But when you view it on your phone, it doesn’t look nearly as nice if it wasn’t developed using responsive design techniques. Images will be too big, the navigation may be impossible to tap and the download time may kill you.
Designers/developers must write the code in a way that looks great no matter what device it is viewed on. Basically, we have to use something called media queries. Media queries are pieces of code that allow us to put details around objects. So we can say if a web page is being viewed on a device with a 460 pixel width, display it like this. But if the web page is being displayed on a device with a 800 pixel width, then display it like that.
It actually goes well beyond just the width. We can decide what to display based on the following factors:
- width
- height
- device-width
- device-height
- orientation
- aspect-ratio
- device-aspect-ratio
- color
- color-index
- monochrome
- resolution
- scan
- grid
We can tell your website if it should use high-res images for Retina Display or no images for a phone display. We have a ton of options. Responsive Design is in its infancy and we are discovering new ways every day to make this logical way of thinking possible. The sad fact is we haven’t quite developed the best way to do this yet. Right now we have to write tons of lines of code to account for all the different resolutions, as well as older versions of browsers that do not support the latest and greatest best practices. But each time we launch a new digital page, we get closer. We make it better. Read More…