Design Process In The Responsive Age | Smashing UX Design. Advertisement You cannot plan for and design a responsive1, content-focused2, mobile-first3 website the same way you’ve been creating websites for years—you just can’t. If your goal is to produce something that is not fixed-width and serves smaller devices just the styles they require, why would you use a dated process that contradicts those goals? I’d like to walk you through some problems caused by using old processes with responsive design. Let’s look into an evolving design process we’ve4 been using with some promising new deliverables and tools.
This should provide a starting point for you to freshen up your own process and bring it into the responsive age. The Problem The issues caused when trying to force new results from an old process are significant yet, strangely enough, not immediately obvious. How should the layout adjust for smaller-sized devices? This can cause major problems if the developer doesn’t feel confident in the visual arena. Work More or Work Efficiently? (jc) (fi) 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. Responsify.it - A responsive template generator. Responsive Design Testing. Responsive Img - a jQuery Plugin for Responsive Images.