15 Responsive CSS Frameworks Worth Considering. Taking the next step of our responsive layout coverage (we recently published the articles Responsive WordPress Themes and jQuery Plugins to help with Responsive Layouts), today we are taking a look at responsive CSS frameworks that we feel are worth your consideration. Just like most CSS frameworks, all of the frameworks below will help you rapidly develop sites by eliminating the need to write basic CSS styles yourself, as you would expect.
But, on top of that, they also come with a responsive layout helping you to quickly and easily create mobile-specific sites. Less Framework 4 The Less Framework contains 4 adaptive layouts and 3 sets of typography presets, all based on a single grid, composed of 68 px columns with 24 px gutters. The idea is to first code the Default Layout (992 px), and then use CSS3 media queries to code several child layouts: 768, 480, and 320 px.
Foundation MQFramework Golden Grid System The Golden Grid System is a folding grid system for responsive design. Columnal. Media Queries. Golden Grid System. GGS was my next step after Less Framework. Instead of a fixed-width grid, it used a fully fluid-width one, without even a maximum width. The resources it was published with are still available on GitHub. The idea was to take a 18-column grid, use the outermost columns as margins, and use the remaining 16 to lay elements out. On smaller screens the 16 columns could be folded into 8, 4 and 2. This behaviour was inspired by Massimo Vignelli's Unigrid system. While the grid's columns were fluid — proportional to the screen's width — the gutters (spaces between the columns) were proportional to the font-size being used.
GGS also contained a set of typographic presets, strictly to a baseline grid. Correctly setting all of these measurements is difficult, of course. When published, GGS gained a lot of attention, as the web design community was searching ways to work with fluid-width grids, which have always been troublesome, running counter to many graphic design principles. Responsive Layouts, Responsively Wireframed. Responsive layouts, responsively wireframed Made with HTML/CSS (no images, no JS*) this is a simple interactive experiment with responsive design techniques. Use the buttons top-right to toggle between desktop and mobile layouts. Using simple layout wireframes, this illustrates how a series of pages could work across these different devices, by simulating how the layout of each page would change responsively, to suit the context.
Responsive layouts? Producing static wireframes to design layouts for websites, web applications and user-interfaces has worked well for a long time. However, with the exponential growth of devices upon which our designs may be viewed, the use of responsive web design techniques is becoming an increasingly popular approach to handling this problem - allowing layouts to adapt to different devices, with their many varied screen sizes.
However, this solution creates a new problem: How should we go about the process of designing these variable layouts? HTML? A Flexible Grid. Responsive Design, Responsively Illustrated.