Learning about responsive web design

[Dynamic_Gravity]

Ahh yeah, well that’s one of the problems that we face in today’s world. Tons of devices. Really makes the planning stage even more crucial.

[SudoSaibot]

@Dynamic_Gravity look if you don’t have the skill,bots can do it for you.

[Argon]

As you become more and more advanced with regards to your skills as a developer/designer, you’ll quickly learn as time goes on, or at least you should learn as time goes on that simplicity is key.

I have no f!$king idea why so many developers just love to over engineer and over complicate things, what’s the point? Likely hood is that it’ll be slower, harder to maintain, bloated, etc. For the life of me I don’t know why people love to make things more complicated than needs be.

With regards to a responsive design and a responsive design alone, you can’t go wrong with a single column layout, it’s easy to read, it’s minimal, and it also sticks to my first point, it’s simple. Don’t get me wrong a single column layout isn’t exactly the most inspiring design ever, but it works, I mean despite all the foul language, the points made on this web page are gold:

http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

The same applies to the back end side of things, I know people just love using things like ORM’s, now don’t get me wrong they’re great, in the correct scenario. I mean would you want to query an entire table and process the entire record when all you wanted was a single column? … I’d hope you wouldn’t to say the very least, I often see people using all of these frameworks in the wrong case scenario, take a lot of these front end frameworks as an example, they’re great at what they do, and they can do a lot, there’s no debate there, but half the time, a lot of websites that use these frameworks use them to about 10% of their true potential.

You’re probably wondering why I’m talking about the development side of things right now, purely because I’m a developer, I actually suck at design, but I know for a fact that a lot of the same core principals that I’ve gone over can also be applied to design.

Back to designs that work fairly well across multiple devices, in addition to the ever so simplistic single column design, you can also try out stuff like :

• Split Screen
• Asymmetrical
• Grid (I suggest less is more)
• Magazine
• Boxes
• Fixed Sidebar
• Featured Image(s)
• F-shape

Sure none of these designs are mind blowing or super duper fancy… But, personally speaking, the best designs I’ve ever seen have been either split screen or asymmetrical, and then they pay attention greatly to the details of the page, from typography through to photography, then nice bits of JS to add animation and a few additional goodies that just really set it off.

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P.S.

CSS grid

I F$!KING LOVE CSS GRID… But I often find that I personally can’t use them in the commercial environment I’m in, I’ve been told that I need support at least IE8+, although IE5+ would be the sweet spot, which sucks for so many reasons, but it sure as hell makes sure that I’m able to build web applications which work across a huge span of devices.