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Responsive Web Design (2011)

by Ethan Marcotte(Favorite Author)

4.28 of 5 Votes: 1

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

A Book Apart

series

A Book Apart

review 1: As I embark on yet another website redesign, I thought it would be a great idea to dig into responsive web design. Ethan Marcotte offered quite an engaging and easy to read walk-through on the basics using examples and pin-pointing things to consider while delving into the topic of responsive websites. I suggest this book to any marketer or anyone that wants to start with “responsive”. It is great for newbies.
review 2: A friend gave me a copy of this when he heard I got a job as an in-house web designer and would be focusing on redesigning websites to be more responsive. I only just barely understood what responsive design was when I started reading this book, but by the end of it I had a clear sense of the principles and how they could be implemented.If ... moreyou're a web designer and know a little about responsive design, then you're at least aware of Marcotte's 2010 article on the subject, on which this book is based (it's here, if you haven't read it). The 3 pillars of responsive design--flexible grids, flexible images, and media queries--are outlined in that article and the book reiterates some of this information. While this might make it seem redundant, Marcotte goes into greater detail on difficulties implementing responsiveness across browsers and solutions to implementation. He also expands further on the idea of a mobile-first approach and how to integrating the idea of responsive design into the overall workflow. This is all good stuff, and Marcotte's conversational, easy-going style makes it highly readable.My criticisms are overall quite small. While Marcotte does walk the reader through a demo site to test responsiveness, he does tend to skip steps as the demos progress. I'm not new to web design or anything like that, but some of the techniques described are new to me and I like a very step-by-step approach when it comes to demos. Mind you, this is a problem I have with lots of web design demos, and having designed web design demos in the past for students, I understand how this happens. The assumed audience here is definitely not a beginner, rather someone well versed in HTML/CSS. It's also more conceptually oriented in some respects than some books on the subject of web design, in part because responsive design is a general term for a set of practices and general approach to web design, not a particular language or program.To Marcotte's credit, he doesn't get too trapped in the conceptual and really brings the approach into a practical context. Just being able to fall back on those 3 pillars or refer to certain sections for reference has been immensely helpful for myself in understanding how to think and work with these ideas in mind. This is an excellent starting point for anyone learning what responsive web design is and how to implement it. It is, after all, written by the man who coined the term. less

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