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Vasilis van Gemert is the Principal Front-end Developer at Mirabeau in The Netherlands and a board member of Fronteers. His aim is to close the gap between design and (front-end) development. He believes the excess of knowledge he has can be better used by others, by more creative and smarter people. You can follow him on Twitter.
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Responsive design is about more than just layout; it’s about designing for the Web, which means, mostly, for people with browsers. And that’s just about everything we know about the people who visit our websites: they are probably using a browser. All the rest we just don’t know.
Up until not so long ago, we used to base our designs on some rather general assumptions about screen size and input type. With the rise of devices with various screen sizes and alternative ways to interact, these assumptions have turned out to be unreliable. We need to upgrade the defaults that we use when we start designing our websites.
Read more...There are several tactics for deciding where to put breakpoints in a responsive design. There is the rusty idea that they should be based on common screen sizes, but this doesn’t scale well. There are no “common” screen sizes. Another popular tactic is to create a breakpoint wherever the layout breaks.
This sounds much better. But it still leaves us with the question, How do you determine whether the layout is broken? One logical answer is to look at classic readability theory and to define our breakpoints based on that.
Read more...An important part of our job is staying up to date. Technologies don't really change that fast — HTML5 and CSS3 take a long time to be specified and implemented. But the ideas surrounding these technologies and the things we can do with them are constantly evolving, and hundreds of blog posts and articles are published every day. There's no way you can read all of those but you'll still have to keep up to date. Here are some tips on doing that while still having some time left to work.
The hardest part of staying up to date is not reading too much. So many articles are published on a daily basis, so you'll need filters. It's unfortunately hard to make a living by reading articles all day, so you don't want to read marginally interesting stuff, and you don't want to read too much. You only want to read relevant stuff. You could try to automate this filtering, but I found that the best filters are actually people and time.
Read more...Editor's Note: This post is the seventh in the new Smashing Daily series on Smashing Magazine, where we highlight items to help you stay on the top of what's going on in the Web industry. Vasilis van Gemert will carefully pick the most interesting discussions, tools, techniques and articles that have been published recently and present them in a nice compact overview.
Vasilis goes through dozens of RSS feeds and hundreds of tweets so that you don’t have to. Do you find the new series interesting? What would you like to have? And what wouldn’t you like to see? Let us know! We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments!
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