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Responsive web design examples are just the well-polished final product that is the result of vision, know-how and hard work that is behind the creation of a website that can be easily accessed across a variety of devices. In this post, we’ll be taking a brief look at what responsive web design is, and follow that with a list of sites that epitomize the principles of friendly and efficient construction.
What Is Responsive Web Design?
In a nutshell, responsive web design is an ideal about proportion. It is a method of constructing websites that will maintain their appeal and features on desktop computers, mobile phones, and tablets. It is both an exercise in careful planning as it is one in versatility. The screens of the different devices have different resolutions, and it is all about writing code that visually translates the same over all those resolutions.
Better said, as it is impossible to build with specific dimensions in mind, responsive web designing means allowing the website to mold to the receptive device. That originally meant a paradigm shift from pixel-based designing to the introduction of relative units of measurement (such as parts or percentages of a whole) when considering the building blocks of a website.
This, in turn, means that you build different parts that will maintain their proportionality irrespective of the screen on which they are viewed. These proportions can be intelligently maneuvered with the help of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) if you have a well-crafted scheme for preserving a set (in-stone) aspect ratio across the whole structure.
The same principle then applies to images, which, for the sake of discussion, have now become fluid images. For the (visual) adjustment part of the process media queries are used, which work on conditional principles.
Responsive web designers have also been following the approach of “mobile first”. That actually means conceptualizing a website for the devices with the smallest screens first, and working their way up to the bigger ones.
Responsive Web Design Examples
- foundermantras.com associates a different mantra to each day. Possibly the biggest challenge faced by the designers of the site has been the transitional features -the user explores mantras from the previous days. The amazing responsiveness of “foundermantras.com” is realized by incorporating the entire CSS chain of command in the “head” section of the html document. Furthermore, it is an icon of simplicity as the media queries and the frameworks look pretty clear-cut, even to the eyes of a neophyte.
- The Forecaster Interactive manages to spring up feelings of nostalgia for a time when media was more information than entertainment, an era ruled by broadsheets. For those who haven’t got it yet, it is an old-fashioned news aggregator. It is a wonderful example of the “mobile first” principle, as the developers have only added successive media queries the moment the layout breaks. Snippets of the code may be discovered here.
- Photoshop Etiquette uses the framework “Foundation” in order to achieve an enviable detail level for a site that does not have Critical CSS. It implements a whole range of media queries, which is a must for a website dedicated in its entirety to visual information. What is particularly impressive is the rendering on mobile devices, as it is well known the problems posed by the primacy length over width.
- Superfriend.ly provides responsive web design services for other sites. It uses Critical CSS in addition to loading the font face rules in the @import, a technique that is decried by other web developers as unnecessary for a single page website. It is also noteworthy that Superfriendly does not use a framework while employing a wee bit of JavaScript here and there in order to showcase their talents. After all, the site is designed to attract new clients.
- Responsive Field Day is another site that is meant to showcase its developer’s talents. They are obviously part of the responsive web developer’s community. The site uses an unusual Grid Framework, the Suit CSS. As one reviewer of this site underlines, by reviewing the code itself one has a lot to learn, from the agglomeration of all the JavaScript commands into a singular file to the multitude of comments inserted in the code on how and why the CSS is compiled in the manner presented.
- CSS Wizardry is as expressive as its name suggests. In fact, it is a site where developer Harry Roberts, one of the creators of the Inuit CSS responsive framework offers his services as a freelancer. As one can expect, the code is masterfully written following the principals we have encountered in the other responsive web design examples we have listed.
These responsive web design examples are just that, lessons from which one can seize the secrets behind developing simple pages that are optimized for all devices, because important sites have already employed this technique or, as some say it, responsive web design is already current web design.
