» The Power of Responsive Design Sprints

Saving Your Web Workflows with Prototyping · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

A well-written (and beautifully designed) article on the nature of the web, and what that means for those of us who build upon it. Matthias builds on the idea of material honestly and concludes that designing through prototypes—rather than making pictures of websites—results in a truer product.

A prototyping mindset means cultivating transparency and showing your work early to your team, to users – and to clients as well, which can spark excited conversations. A prototyping mindset also means valuing learning over fast results. And it means involving everyone from the beginning and closely working together as a team to dissolve the separation of linear workflows.

Using Photoshop in Responsive Workflows - Web Standards Sherpa

A nice summation by Dan of when it makes sense to use a graphic design tool like Photoshop and when it makes sense to use a web browser.

Responsive web design: the war has not yet been won

This was the crux of Elliot’s excellent talk at the Responsive Day Out. I heartily concur with this:

Once you overcome that initial struggle of adapting to a new process, designing and building responsive sites needn’t take any longer, or cost any more money. The real obstacle is designers and developers being set in their ways.

Let’s Talk Solar | LOGO24

Here’s a really useful case study for anyone who wants to do “guerrilla” responsive design: when you’re handed a fixed-width mockup but you know that responsive is the way to go:

I started by styling up every element, without layout. The result was a fully elastic layout that effectively served as a mobile, or small screen, layout, which just needed some tweaking of horizontal spacing.

Bingo! And this approach had knock-on benefits as it “supported writing component-based, or modular, CSS”.

A Responsive Design Case Study – David Bushell – Web Design & Front-end Development

I love seeing the process behind responsive projects. This one is particularly nice.