Planting the Seed for a Responsive Future

Stephanie Rieger has a beautiful post called Responsive Is a Characteristic, which is a fantastic reminder that responsiveness should be an important component of any project, even if it’s not a full-blown, certified-organic responsive experience. This is what I tend to call “planting the seed” for more adaptive experiences. Here’s the gist: The basic idea is that a creating a separate mobile experience can actually be a blessing in disguise. It gives you time to re-evaluate, prioritize, strip down and [...]

Optimizing Web Experiences for High Resolution Screens

I wrote yesterday about how the iPad3′s Retina display will cause issues for web designers. When the iPhone 4 came out, I can recall lots of fire drills at work to go through and update to Retina-ready graphics for a number of our clients. The iPad’s screen size compounds the problem. “@Malarkey Screen resolutions are going to increase. Period. Adaptation is the name of the game in web design. The sky is not falling.” — @robweychert The sky isn’t falling [...]

iPad3′s Retina Display Will Wreak Havoc on the Web

The iPad3’s Retina display is causing problems for apps who have to deal with Apple’s 20MB limit on app size. You know the web is in trouble when even the native apps are struggling with the gigantic Retina screen. The difference of course between a native app and a website is that the bulk of the file size for native apps can be handled in one fell swoop upon download, while assets are requested on demand for the web. This [...]

Responsive Navigation Patterns

Top and left navigations are typical on large screens, but lack of screen real estate on small screens makes for an interesting challenge. As responsive design becomes more popular, it’s worth looking at the various ways of handling navigation for small screen sizes. Mobile web navigation must strike a balance between quick access to a site’s information and unobtrusiveness. Here’s some of the more popular techniques for handling navigation in responsive designs: Top Nav or “Do Nothing” Approach The Footer [...]