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Responsive design

• Overview: CSS layout

Responsive web design (RWD) is a web design approach to make web pages render well on all screen sizes and resolutions while ensuring good usability. It is the way to design for a multi-device web. In this article, we'll help you understand some techniques that can be used to master it.

Precursor to responsive design: mobile web design

Before responsive web design became the standard approach for making websites work across different device types, web developers used to talk about mobile web design, mobile web development, or sometimes, mobile-friendly design. These are basically the same as responsive web design — the goals are to make sure that websites work well across devices with different physical attributes (screen size, resolution) in terms of layout, content (text and media), and performance.

The difference is mainly to do with the devices involved, and the technologies available to create solutions:

• We used to talk about desktop or mobile, but now there are many different types of device available such as desktop, laptop, mobile, tablets, watches, etc. Instead of catering for a few different screen sizes, we now need to design sites defensively to cater for common screen sizes and resolutions, plus unknowns.
• You should still use the techniques discussed in this article to serve mobile users a suitable experience, as there are still constraints such as battery life and bandwidth to worry about.
• User experience is also a concern. A mobile user of a travel site might just want to check flight times and delay information, for example, and not be presented with a 3D animated globe showing flight paths and your company history. This can be handled using responsive design techniques, however.
• Modern technologies are much better for creating responsive experiences. For example, responsive images/media technologies now allow appropriate media to be served to different devices without having to rely on techniques like server-side sniffing.

Introducing responsive web design

HTML is fundamentally responsive, or fluid . If you create a web page containing only HTML, with no CSS, and resize the window, the browser will automatically reflow the text to fit the viewport.

While the default responsive behavior may sound like no solution is needed, long lines of text displayed full screen on a wide monitor can be difficult to read. If wide screen line length is reduced with CSS, such as by creating columns or adding significant padding, the site may look squashed for the user who narrows their browser window or opens the site on a mobile device.

Creating a non-resizable web page by setting a fixed width doesn't work either; that leads to scroll bars on narrow devices and too much empty space on wide screens.

Responsive web design, or RWD, is a design approach that addresses the range of devices and device sizes, enabling automatic adaption to the screen, whether the content is viewed on a tablet, phone, television, or watch.

Responsive web design isn't a separate technology — it is an approach. It is a term used to describe a set of best practices used to create a layout that can respond to any device being used to view the content.

The term responsive design , coined by Ethan Marcotte in 2010 , described using fluid grids, fluid images, and media queries to create responsive content, as discussed in Zoe Mickley Gillenwater's book Flexible Web Design .

At the time, the recommendation was to use CSS float for layout and media queries to query the browser width, creating layouts for different breakpoints. Fluid images are set to not exceed the width of their container; they have their max-width property set to 100% . Fluid images scale down when their containing column narrows but do not grow larger than their intrinsic size when the column grows. This enables an image to scale down to fit its content, rather than overflow it, but not grow larger and become pixelated if the container becomes wider than the image.

Modern CSS layout methods are inherently responsive, and, since the publication of Gillenwater's book and Marcotte's article, we have a multitude of features built into the web platform to make designing responsive sites easier.

The rest of this article will point you to the various web platform features you might want to use when creating a responsive site.

Media Queries

Media queries allow us to run a series of tests (e.g. whether the user's screen is greater than a certain width, or a certain resolution) and apply CSS selectively to style the page appropriately for the user's needs.

For example, the following media query tests to see if the current web page is being displayed as screen media (therefore not a printed document) and the viewport is at least 80rem wide. The CSS for the .container selector will only be applied if these two things are true.

You can add multiple media queries within a stylesheet, tweaking your whole layout or parts of it to best suit the various screen sizes. The points at which a media query is introduced, and the layout changed, are known as breakpoints .

A common approach when using Media Queries is to create a simple single-column layout for narrow-screen devices (e.g. mobile phones), then check for wider screens and implement a multiple-column layout when you know that you have enough screen width to handle it. Designing for mobile first is known as mobile first design.

If using breakpoints, best practices encourage defining media query breakpoints with relative units rather than absolute sizes of an individual device.

There are different approaches to the styles defined within a media query block; ranging from using media queries to <link> style sheets based on browser size ranges to only including custom properties variables to store values associated with each breakpoint.

Find out more in the MDN documentation for Media Queries .

Media queries can help with RWD, but are not a requirement. Flexible grids, relative units, and minimum and maximum unit values can be used without queries.

Responsive layout technologies

Responsive sites are built on flexible grids, meaning you don't need to target every possible device size with pixel perfect layouts.

By using a flexible grid, you can change a feature or add in a breakpoint and change the design at the point where the content starts to look bad. For example, to ensure line lengths don't become unreadably long as the screen size increases you can use columns ; if a box becomes squashed with two words on each line as it narrows you can set a breakpoint.

Several layout methods, including Multiple-column layout , Flexbox , and Grid are responsive by default. They all assume that you are trying to create a flexible grid and give you easier ways to do so.

With multicol, you specify a column-count to indicate the maximum number of columns you want your content to be split into. The browser then works out the size of these, a size that will change according to the screen size.

If you instead specify a column-width , you are specifying a minimum width. The browser will create as many columns of that width as will comfortably fit into the container, then share out the remaining space between all the columns. Therefore the number of columns will change according to how much space there is.

You can use the columns shorthand to provide a maximum number of columns and a minimum column width. This can ensure line lengths don't become unreadably long as the screen size increases or too narrow as the screen size decreases.

In Flexbox, flex items shrink or grow, distributing space between the items according to the space in their container. By changing the values for flex-grow and flex-shrink you can indicate how you want the items to behave when they encounter more or less space around them.

In the example below the flex items will each take an equal amount of space in the flex container, using the shorthand of flex: 1 as described in the layout topic Flexbox: Flexible sizing of flex items .

Note: As an example, we have built a simple responsive layout above using flexbox. We use a breakpoint to switch to multiple columns when the screen grows, and limit the size of the main content with max-width : example , source code .

In CSS Grid Layout the fr unit allows the distribution of available space across grid tracks. The next example creates a grid container with three tracks sized at 1fr . This will create three column tracks, each taking one part of the available space in the container. You can find out more about this approach to create a grid in the Learn Layout Grids topic, under Flexible grids with the fr unit .

Note: The grid layout version is even simpler as we can define the columns on the .wrapper: example , source code .

Responsive images/media

To ensure media is never larger than its responsive container, the following approach can be used:

This scales media to ensure they never overflow their containers. Using a single large image and scaling it down to fit small devices wastes bandwidth by downloading images larger than what is needed.

Responsive Images, using the <picture> element and the <img> srcset and sizes attributes enables serving images targeted to the user's viewport and the device's resolution. For example, you can include a square image for mobile, but show the same scene as a landscape image on desktop.

The <picture> element enables providing multiple sizes along with "hints" (metadata that describes the screen size and resolution the image is best suited for), and the browser will choose the most appropriate image for each device, ensuring that a user will download an image size appropriate for the device they are using. Using <picture> along with max-width removes the need for sizing images with media queries. It enables targeting images with different aspect ratios to different viewport sizes.

You can also art direct images used at different sizes, thus providing a different crop or completely different image to different screen sizes.

You can find a detailed guide to Responsive Images in the Learn HTML section here on MDN.

Other useful tips:

• Always make sure to use an appropriate image format for your website images (such as PNG or JPG), and make sure to optimize the file size using a graphics editor before you put them on your website.
• You can make use of CSS features like gradients and shadows to implement visual effects without using images.
• You can use media queries inside the media attribute on <source> elements nested inside <video> / <audio> elements to serve video/audio files as appropriate for different devices (responsive video/audio).

Responsive typography

Responsive typography describes changing font sizes within media queries or using viewport units to reflect lesser or greater amounts of screen real estate.

Using media queries for responsive typography

In this example, we want to set our level 1 heading to be 4rem , meaning it will be four times our base font size. That's a really large heading! We only want this jumbo heading on larger screen sizes, therefore we first create a smaller heading then use media queries to overwrite it with the larger size if we know that the user has a screen size of at least 1200px .

We have edited our responsive grid example above to also include responsive type using the method outlined. You can see how the heading switches sizes as the layout goes to the two column version.

On mobile the heading is smaller:

On desktop, however, we see the larger heading size:

Note: See this example in action: example , source code .

As this approach to typography shows, you do not need to restrict media queries to only changing the layout of the page. They can be used to tweak any element to make it more usable or attractive at alternate screen sizes.

Using viewport units for responsive typography

Viewport units vw can also be used to enable responsive typography, without the need for setting breakpoints with media queries. 1vw is equal to one percent of the viewport width, meaning that if you set your font size using vw , it will always relate to the size of the viewport.

The problem with doing the above is that the user loses the ability to zoom any text set using the vw unit, as that text is always related to the size of the viewport. Therefore you should never set text using viewport units alone .

There is a solution, and it involves using calc() . If you add the vw unit to a value set using a fixed size such as em s or rem s then the text will still be zoomable. Essentially, the vw unit adds on top of that zoomed value:

This means that we only need to specify the font size for the heading once, rather than set it up for mobile and redefine it in the media queries. The font then gradually increases as you increase the size of the viewport.

Note: See an example of this in action: example , source code .

The viewport meta tag

If you look at the HTML source of a responsive page, you will usually see the following <meta> tag in the <head> of the document.

This viewport meta tag tells mobile browsers that they should set the width of the viewport to the device width, and scale the document to 100% of its intended size, which shows the document at the mobile-optimized size that you intended.

Why is this needed? Because mobile browsers tend to lie about their viewport width.

This meta tag exists because when smartphones first arrived, most sites were not mobile optimized. The mobile browser would, therefore, set the viewport width to 980 pixels, render the page at that width, and show the result as a zoomed-out version of the desktop layout. Users could zoom in and pan around the website to view the bits they were interested in, but it looked bad.

By setting width=device-width you are overriding a mobile device's default, like Apple's default width=980px , with the actual width of the device. Without it, your responsive design with breakpoints and media queries may not work as intended on mobile browsers. If you've got a narrow screen layout that kicks in at 480px viewport width or less, but the device is saying it is 980px wide, that user will not see your narrow screen layout.

So you should always include the viewport meta tag in the head of your documents.

Responsive design refers to a site or application design that responds to the environment in which it is viewed. It encompasses a number of CSS and HTML features and techniques and is now essentially just how we build websites by default. Consider the sites that you visit on your phone — it is probably fairly unusual to come across a site that is the desktop version scaled down, or where you need to scroll sideways to find things. This is because the web has moved to this approach of designing responsively.

It has also become much easier to achieve responsive designs with the help of the layout methods you have learned in these lessons. If you are new to web development today you have many more tools at your disposal than in the early days of responsive design. It is therefore worth checking the age of any materials you are using. While the historical articles are still useful, modern use of CSS and HTML makes it far easier to create elegant and useful designs, no matter what device your visitor views the site with.

• Touch events provide the ability to interpret finger (or stylus) activity on touch screens or trackpads, enabling quality support for complex touch-based user interfaces.
• Use the pointer or any-pointer media queries to load different CSS on touch-enabled devices.
• CSS-Tricks Guide to Media Queries

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The Beginner’s Guide to Responsive Web Design (Code Samples & Layout Examples)

With an internet increasingly accessed from mobile devices, it’s no longer enough to have a static website design that only looks good on a computer screen.

Not to mention, you also have to consider tablets, 2-in-1 laptops, and different smartphone models with different screen dimensions when coming up with a design.

So slapping your content into a single column and calling it quits isn’t going to cut it.

With responsive web design , you can make sure your website looks its best on cell phones, tablets, laptops, and desktop screens.

And that improvement in user experience means higher conversions and business growth.

This guide will give you everything you need to know about responsive website design, including definitions, a step-by-step walkthrough, examples, and more.

What Is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive design is an approach to web design that makes your web content adapt to the different screen and window sizes of a variety of devices.

For example, your content might be separated into different columns on desktop screens, because they are wide enough to accommodate that design.

If you separate your content into multiple columns on a mobile device, it will be hard for users to read and interact with.

Responsive design makes it possible to deliver multiple, separate layouts of your content and design to different devices depending on screen size.

Responsive Web Design vs Adaptive Design

The difference between responsive design and adaptive design is that responsive design adapts the rendering of a single page version. In contrast, adaptive design delivers multiple completely different versions of the same page.

They are both crucial web design trends  that help webmasters control how their site looks on different screens, but the approach is different.

With responsive design, users will access the same basic file through their browser, regardless of device, but CSS code will control the layout and render it differently based on screen size. With adaptive design, there is a script that checks for the screen size, and then accesses the template designed for that device.

Why Responsive Design Matters

If you’re new to web design, development , or blogging , you might wonder why responsive design matters in the first place.

The answer is simple. It’s no longer enough to design for a single device. Mobile web traffic has overtaken desktop and now makes up the majority of website traffic , accounting for more than 51% .

When over half of your potential visitors are using a mobile device to browse the internet, you can’t just serve them a page designed for desktop. It would be hard to read and use, and lead to bad user experience.

But that’s not all. Users on mobile devices also make up the majority of search engine visits .

Finally, over the last few years, mobile has become one of the most important advertising channels. Even in a post-pandemic market, mobile ad spending is growing 4.8% to $91.52 billion.

Whether you choose to advertise on social media or use an organic approach like YouTube SEO , the vast majority of your traffic will come from mobile users.

If your landing pages aren’t optimized for mobile and easy to use, you won’t be able to maximize the ROI of your marketing efforts. Bad conversion rates will lead to fewer leads and wasted ad spend.

Are WordPress Sites Responsive?

Whether or not WordPress sites are responsive depends on the theme of your WP site. A WordPress theme  is the equivalent of a template for a static website and controls the design and layout of your content.

If you use a default WordPress theme, like Twenty Twenty , the design is responsive, but since it’s a single-column design, you might not realize it when looking at it on different screens.

If you use another WordPress theme, you can test if it’s responsive or not by comparing how it looks on different devices or using Chrome Developer Tools.

The Building Blocks of Responsive Web Design

In this section, we’ll cover the underlying foundation for responsive website design and its different building blocks.

CSS and HTML

The foundation of responsive design is the combination of HTML and CSS , two languages that control the content and layout of a page in any given web browser.

HTML mainly controls the structure, elements, and content of a webpage. For example, to add an image to a website , you have to use HTML code like this:

You can set a “class” or “id” that you can later target with CSS code .

You could also control primary attributes such as height and width within your HTML, but this is no longer considered best practice.

Instead, CSS is used to edit the design and layout of the elements you include on a page with HTML. CSS code can be included in a <style> section of a HTML document, or as a separate stylesheet file .

For example, we could edit the width of all HTML images at the element level like this:

Or we could target the specific class “full-width-img” by adding a period in front.

You can also control the design beyond just height, width, and color . Using CSS like this is how you make a design responsive when you combine it with a technique called media query.

Media Queries

A media query is a fundamental part of CSS3 that lets you render content to adapt to different factors like screen size or resolution.

It works in a similar way to an “if clause” in some programming languages , basically checking if  a screen’s viewport is wide enough or too wide before executing the appropriate code.

If the screen is at least 780 pixels wide, “full-width-img” class images will take up 90% of the screen and be automatically centered by equally wide margins.

Fluid Layouts

A fluid layout is an essential part of modern responsive design. In the good old days, you would set a static value for every HTML element, like 600 pixels.

A fluid layout relies instead on dynamic values like a percentage of the viewport width.

This approach will dynamically increase or decrease the different container element sizes based on the size of the screen.

Flexbox Layout

While a percentage-based layout is fluid, many designers and web developers felt it was not dynamic or flexible enough. Flexbox is a CSS module designed as a more efficient way to lay out multiple elements, even when the size of the contents inside the container is unknown.

A flex container expands items to fill available free space or shrinks them to prevent overflow. These flex containers have a number of unique properties, like justify-content, that you can’t edit with a regular HTML element.

It’s a complicated topic, so if you want to use it in your design, you should read CSS Tricks’ flexbox guide .

Responsive Images

The most basic iteration of responsive images follows the same concept as a fluid layout, using a dynamic unit to control the width or height. The sample CSS code we covered earlier already accomplishes this:

The % unit approximates to a single percentage of the width or height of the viewport and makes sure the image remains in proportion to the screen.

The problem with this approach is that every user has to download the full-sized image, even on mobile.

To serve different versions scaled for different devices, you need to use the HTML srcset attribute in your img tags, to specify more than one image size to choose from.

WordPress automatically uses this functionality for images included in posts or pages.

When you’re attempting to create a responsive design for your website, the loading speed should be a top priority .

Pages that load in 2 seconds have an average 9% bounce rate , while pages that take 5 seconds lead to a 38% bounce rate.

Your approach to responsiveness must not block or delay your page’s first render any more than it needs to.

There are several ways you could make your pages faster. Optimizing your images , implementing caching , minification, using a more efficient CSS layout, avoiding render-blocking JS , and improving your critical rendering path are all great ideas you should consider.

Kinsta customers have access to a quick and easy way to accomplish this by using the   code minification feature that is built right into the MyKinsta dashboard , allowing customers to enable automatic CSS and JavaScript minification with a simple click.

You could also try to implement Google AMP for your mobile pages, but in our Google AMP case study , our mobile leads dropped by a whopping 59%.

Common Responsive Breakpoints

To work with media queries, you need to decide on the “responsive breakpoints” or screen size breakpoints. A breakpoint is the width of the screen where you use a media query to implement new CSS styles.

Common screen sizes

• Mobile: 360 x 640
• Mobile: 375 x 667
• Mobile: 360 x 720
• iPhone X: 375 x 812
• Pixel 2: 411 x 731
• Tablet: 768 x 1024
• Laptop: 1366 x 768
• High-res laptop or desktop: 1920 x 1080

If you choose a mobile-first approach to design, with a single column and smaller font sizes as the basis, you don’t need to include mobile breakpoints — unless you want to optimize the design for specific models.

So you can create a basic responsive design with just two breakpoints, one for tablets and one for laptops and desktop computers.

Bootstrap’s Responsive Breakpoints

As one of the first, and most popular, responsive frameworks, Bootstrap led the assault on static web design and helped establish mobile-first design as an industry standard.

As a result, many designers to this day still follow Bootstrap’s screen-width breakpoints.

They use media queries to target landscape phones (576px), tablets (768px), laptops (992px) and extra large desktop screens (1200px).

How to Make Your Website Responsive

Now that you’re familiar with the building blocks, it’s time to make your website responsive.

Set Your Media Query Ranges (Responsive Breakpoints)

Set your media query ranges based on the unique needs of your design. For example, if we wanted to follow the Bootstrap standards for our design, we would use the following media queries:

• 576px for portrait phones
• 768px for tablets
• 992px for laptops
• 1200px for large devices

Size Layout Elements with Percentages or Create a CSS Grid Layout

The first and most important step is to set up different sizes for different layout elements depending on the media query or screen breakpoint.

The number of layout containers you have will depend on the design, but most websites focus on the elements listed below:

• Wrapper or Container

Using a mobile-first approach , you can style the main layout elements like this (with no media query for the basic styles for mobile phones):

In a percentage-based approach, the “float” attribute controls which side of the screen an element will appear on, left, or right.

If you want to go beyond the basics and create a cutting-edge responsive design, you need to familiarize yourself with the CSS flexbox layout and its attributes like box-sizing  and flex .

Implement Responsive Images

One way to make sure that your images don’t break is merely using a dynamic value for all pictures, as we covered earlier.

But that won’t reduce the load placed on your mobile visitors when they access your website.

Make sure you always include a srcset that with different sizes of your photo when you add images to your pages.

Doing this manually can be quite time-consuming, but with a CMS like WordPress , it automatically happens when you upload media files .

Responsive Typography For Your Website Text

The main focus of responsive web design is on the responsiveness of the layout blocks, elements, and media. Text is often treated as an afterthought.

But for a truly responsive design, you should also adjust your font-sizes appropriately to match screen size.

The easiest way to do so is to set a static value for font-size, like 22 px, and adapt it in each media query .

You can target multiple text elements at the same time by using a comma to separate each one.

Test Responsiveness

First, you want to test whether your site is mobile-friendly with Google’s mobile-friendly test . Simply enter the URL of your website and click the “test URL” button to get the results.

Don’t worry if it takes a while to fetch your site. That doesn’t reflect your page loading speed.

If you followed the steps outlined in this article, it should say that you have a mobile-friendly website.

Then you want to test your site on multiple screen sizes with a tool like Chrome developer tools .

Press CTRL + Shift + I on Windows computers, or Command + Option + I on Macs to open the relevant device view. From here, you can select the mobile device or tablet of your choice to test the responsiveness of your design.

There are a couple of questions you want to answer when going through this process.

• Does the layout adjust to the correct amount of columns?
• Does the content fit well inside the layout elements and containers on different screens?
• Do the font sizes fit each screen?

CSS Units and Values for Responsive Design

CSS has both absolute and relative units of measurement. An example of an absolute unit of length is a cm or a px. Relative units or dynamic values depend on the size and resolution of the screen or the font sizes of the root element.

PX vs EM vs REM vs Viewport Units for responsive design

• PX – a single pixel
• EM – relative unit based on the font-size of the element.
• REM – relative unit based on the font-size of the element.
• VH, VW – % of the viewport’s height or width.
• % – the percentage of the parent element.

A new web designer or developer should probably stick with pixels for text because they are the most straight-forward unit of length in CSS.

But when setting the width and max-width of images and other elements, using % is the best solution. This approach will make sure the components adjust to the screen size of every device.

Responsive Design Examples

Below we will cover a few examples of responsive web design from different industries — and learn from what they do right and wrong.

1. Online Newspaper: New York Times

On desktop, the NYT layout reminds you of a traditional newspaper, crowded with visuals and different rows and columns of content. There seems to be a separate column or row for every category of news.

On mobile, it conforms to the single-column standard and also adjusts the menu to be in the accordion format to be easier to use.

2. Blog: The Art of Non-Conformity

Chris Guillebeau’s blog “The Art of Non-Conformity” has been going strong for over a decade. While the design isn’t the most cutting edge, it’s responsive and adapts the two-column sidebar and main content layout to a single-column design on mobile devices.

3. Ecommerce: Amazon

Amazon is a global leader in ecommerce for a reason, their user interface is perfectly fluid across all devices.

Their tablet layout simply removes some of the white space and adds a scrollable section of icons to fit more content into a smaller package.

Their mobile layout brings it into a single column, focusing on the essentials, like recent purchase history, rather than the different section link icons from their main homepage.

4. Video Site: YouTube

YouTube on mobile, tablet, and laptop

The core of YouTube’s homepage design is a flexible grid of videos that are relevant to each user. On tablets, the number of columns in each row goes down to three. On mobile, it’s reduced to a single-column design.

The mobile version also moves the main menu to the bottom of the screen, closer to the thumbs of their smartphone users. This simple move improves navigation and UX.

5. Online Magazine: Wired

Wired’s approach to responsive web design is focused on implementing a single-column layout on all smaller screens, starting with tablets.

It’s a basic layout but makes it easier to draw user attention to top stories and their CTA to subscribe .

There are a lot of different elements that go into responsive web design. Without a basic understanding of HTML and CSS, it can be easy to make mistakes.

But through familiarizing yourself with the different building blocks, analyzing the examples with web dev tools, and testing as you go using the sample code, you should be able to make your website responsive without any major issue.

If that sounds too much to achieve, you can always either hire a WordPress developer or simply make sure your theme is already responsive.

Head of Content at Kinsta and Content Marketing Consultant for WordPress plugin developers. Connect with Matteo on Twitter .

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I like to design my responsive websites with breakpoints that are based on the content of the website rather than on device sizes. For example, sometimes 4 columns need to change to 2 columns at a width when the 4 columns become too narrow to read. That width may not correspond to a specific device breakpoint. This is also true of font sizes. Sometimes you need to adjust a font size when it starts being unreadable which may be at a width that is not based on a device breakpoint. Creating breakpoints based on design/content rather than devices gives the reader, the consumer of the content, a better experience.

Thanks a lot for this awesome article. Your ideas are absolutely fantastic. Really helpful for the beginners for web design .

Great examples have been mentioned here..!! Mobile responsive design… Its became a new trend as mobile users are increasing day-by-day. Yes it is good to optimize our site for mobile users for better user experience..

Very enriching article! Just want I was looking for!

Wow one clear, near and on point article about responsive design. Thank you so much

Unfortunately Chrome DEV tools doesn’t account for viewport size, but only for screen size. So if the simulated mobile screen in the DEV tools is using “pixel merging”, say it simulates 1 pixel out of 4 real device pixels, setting the real device pixel size in the Chrome DEV tools will not give you the real view on that mobile screen. So before testing for a phone with a certain resolution, you should check what is the viewport size for that phone screen, and use it instead of the device resolution, to be able to simulate that screen accurately in the Chrome DEV tools.

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Responsive web design basics

As the number of mobile phone users on the internet increases, it has become more and more important for web designers to lay out content in ways that work well for a variety of screen sizes. Responsive web design, originally defined by Ethan Marcotte in A List Apart , is a design strategy that responds to users' needs and their devices' capabilities by changing a site's layout to suit the device being used. For example, a responsive site might show content in a single-column view on a phone, two columns on a tablet, and three or four columns on a desktop computer.

Because internet-capable devices have so many possible screen sizes, it's important for your site to adapt to any existing or future screen size. Modern responsive design also accounts for modes of interaction such as touch screens. The goal is to optimize the experience for everyone.

Set the viewport

Pages optimized for a variety of devices must include a meta viewport tag in the head of the document. This tag tells the browser how to control the page's dimensions and scaling.

To try to provide the best experience, mobile browsers render the page at a desktop screen width (usually about 980px , though this varies across devices), and then try to make the content look better by increasing font sizes and scaling the content to fit the screen. This can make fonts look inconsistent and require users to zoom in to see and interact with the content.

Using the meta viewport value width=device-width tells the page to match the screen's width in device-independent pixels (DIP), a standard visual pixel unit (which can be made up of many physical pixels on a high-density screen). This lets the page reflow content to match different screen sizes.

Some browsers keep the page's width constant when rotating to landscape mode, and zoom to fill the screen instead of reflowing. Adding the value initial-scale=1 tells browsers to set a 1:1 relationship between CSS pixels and device-independent pixels regardless of device orientation, letting the page take advantage of the full landscape width.

The Does not have a <meta name="viewport"> tag with width or initial-scale Lighthouse audit can help you automate the process of making sure your HTML documents use the viewport meta tag correctly.

Size content to the viewport

On both desktop and mobile devices, users are used to scrolling websites vertically but not horizontally. Forcing the user to scroll horizontally or to zoom out to see the whole page causes a poor user experience.

When developing a mobile site with a meta viewport tag, it's common to accidentally create page content that doesn't quite fit within the specified viewport. For example, an image displayed wider than the viewport can cause horizontal scrolling. To prevent this, adjust your content to fit inside the viewport.

The Content is not sized correctly for the viewport Lighthouse audit can help you automate the process of detecting overflowing content.

An image with fixed dimensions causes the page to scroll if it's larger than the viewport. We recommend giving all images a max-width of 100% , which shrinks images to fit the available space while preventing them from stretching beyond their initial size.

In most cases, you can do this by adding the following to your style sheet:

Add the dimensions of the image to the img element

Even when you set max-width: 100% , we still recommend adding width and height attributes to your <img> tags so the browser can reserve space for images before they load. This helps prevent layout shifts .

Because screen dimensions and width in CSS pixels vary widely between devices (for example, between phones and tablets, and even between different phones), content shouldn't rely on a particular viewport width to render well.

In the past, this required setting layout elements in percentages. Using pixel measurements requires the user to scroll horizontally on small screens:

Using percentages instead makes the columns narrower on smaller screens, because each column always takes up the same percentage of the screen width:

Modern CSS layout techniques such as Flexbox, Grid Layout, and Multicol make creating these flexible grids much easier.

Use Flexbox when you have a set of items of different sizes and you want them to fit comfortably in a row or multiple rows, with smaller items taking up less space and larger ones taking more space.

You can use Flexbox to display items as a single row, or wrapped onto multiple rows as the available space decreases.

Read more about Flexbox .

CSS Grid Layout

CSS Grid Layout creates flexible grids. You can improve the earlier floated example using use grid layout and the fr unit, which represents a portion of the available space in the container.

You can also use Grid Layout to create regular grid layouts with as many items as can fit. The number of available tracks is reduced as the screen size decreases. The following demo shows a grid containing as many cards as fit on each row, with a minimum size of 200px .

Read more about CSS Grid Layout

Multiple-column layout

For some types of layout, you can use Multiple-column Layout (Multicol), which creates responsive numbers of columns with the column-width property. In the following demo, the page adds columns when there's room for another 200px column.

Read more about Multicol

Use CSS media queries for responsiveness

Sometimes you might need to make more extensive changes to your layout to support certain screen sizes than the techniques described previously allow. This is where media queries become useful.

Media queries are simple filters that you can apply to CSS styles, to change those styles based on the types of device rendering the content. They can also change styling based on device features including width, height, orientation, and whether the device is being used as a touchscreen.

To provide different styles for printing, you can target an output type and include a style sheet for print styles:

You can also use a media query to include print styles in your main style sheet:

For responsive web design, the most common queries are for device features, so you can customize your layout for touchscreens or smaller screens.

Media queries based on viewport size

Media queries let you create a responsive experience that applies specific styles to specific screen size. Queries for screen size can test for the following things:

• width ( min-width , max-width )
• height ( min-height , max-height )
• orientation
• aspect-ratio

All of these features have excellent browser support. For more details, including browser support information, see width , height , orientation , and aspect-ratio on MDN.

Media queries based on device capability

Given the range of devices available, developers can't assume that every large device is a regular desktop or laptop computer, or that every small device uses a touchscreen. Some newer additions to the media queries specification let you test for features such as the type of pointer used to interact with the device and whether the user can hold a pointer over elements.

• any-pointer

Try viewing this demo on different devices, such as a regular desktop computer and a phone or tablet.

These newer features have good support in all modern browsers. Find out more on the MDN pages for hover , any-hover , pointer , and any-pointer .

Use any-hover and any-pointer

The features any-hover and any-pointer test if the user can hold a pointer over elements (often called hovering ), or use a pointer at all, even if it's not the primary way they interact with their device. Be very careful when using these, for example to avoid forcing a touchscreen user to switch to a mouse. However, any-hover and any-pointer can be useful if it's important to determine what kind of device a user has. For example, a laptop with a touchscreen and trackpad should match coarse and fine pointers, in addition to the ability to hover.

How to choose breakpoints

Don't define breakpoints based on device classes, or any product, brand name, or operating system. This makes your code difficult to maintain. Instead, let the content determine how its layout changes to fit the container.

Pick major breakpoints by starting small, then working up

Design the content to fit on a small screen size first, then expand the screen until a breakpoint becomes necessary. This lets you minimize the number of breakpoints on your page and optimize them based on content.

The following example walks through the weather forecast widget example at the beginning of this page. The first step is to make the forecast look good on a small screen:

Next, resize the browser until there's too much whitespace between the elements to make the widget look good. The decision is subjective, but more than 600px is certainly too wide.

To insert a breakpoint at 600px , create two media queries at the end of your CSS for the component: one to use when the browser is 600px or narrower, and one for when it's wider than 600px .

Finally, refactor the CSS. Inside the media query for a max-width of 600px , add the CSS which is only for small screens. Inside the media query for a min-width of 601px add CSS for larger screens.

Pick minor breakpoints when necessary

In addition to choosing major breakpoints when layout changes significantly, it's also helpful to adjust for minor changes. For example, between major breakpoints it can be helpful to adjust the margins or padding on an element, or increase the font size to make it feel more natural in the layout.

This example follows the same pattern as the previous one, starting with optimizing smaller screen layouts. First, boost the font when the viewport width is greater than 360px . After that, when there's enough space, you can separate the high and low temperatures so they're on the same line, and make the weather icons larger.

For large screens, we recommend limiting the maximum width of the forecast panel so it doesn't use the whole screen width.

Optimize text for reading

Classic readability theory suggests that an ideal column should contain 70 to 80 characters per line (about 8 to 10 words in English). Consider adding a breakpoint every time the width of a text block grows past about 10 words.

In this example, the Roboto font at 1em produces 10 words per line on the smaller screen, but larger screens need a breakpoint. In this case, if the browser width is greater than 575px , the ideal content width is 550px .

Avoid hiding content (:#avoid-hiding-content)

Be careful when choosing what content to hide or show depending on screen size. Don't hide content just because you can't fit it on the screen. Screen size doesn't predict what a user might want to see. For example, removing the pollen count from the weather forecast could be a serious issue for springtime allergy sufferers who need that information to decide whether they can go outside.

View media query breakpoints in Chrome DevTools

After you set up your media query breakpoints, check how they affect your site's appearance. You could resize your browser window to trigger the breakpoints, but Chrome DevTools has a built-in feature that shows how a page looks under different breakpoints.

To view your page under different breakpoints:

• Open DevTools .
• Turn on Device Mode . This opens in responsive mode by default.
• To see your media queries, open the Device Mode menu and select Show media queries . This shows your breakpoints as colored bars above your page.
• Click one of the bars to view your page while that media query is active. Right-click a bar to jump to that media query's definition.

Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License , and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License . For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies . Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Last updated 2019-02-12 UTC.

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Responsive web design is an approach to web development aimed at creating websites that adapt and respond to different screen sizes and devices.

The primary goal of responsive design is to provide an optimal and consistent user experience across a wide range of platforms, including desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

The following diagram shows how responsive web design allows the layout to adapt to various user devices without compromising user experience.

• CSS Media Queries

Media queries are CSS rules that apply specific styles and layout adjustments based on various conditions, such as screen size, resolution, orientation, or other device characteristics.

Media queries are essential for creating responsive and adaptive web designs that look and function optimally across different devices and screen dimensions.

Let's look at an example.

Here, the CSS enclosed in a media query will be applied only when the minimum width of the device is 768px.

• Responsive Column Layout

Column layout refers to the arrangement of content on a webpage in multiple columns. This allows us to organize and present information in a structured and visually appealing manner.

There are several column layout configurations: 3-column, 2-column, and 1-column layouts.

Let's see how we can make responsive column layouts.

Browser Output

In the above example, the flex property allows us to create three column layouts.

This type of layout is generally used for desktops and laptops to arrange different types of content in different columns.

For example, a three-column layout might be used in a news website to display headlines in one column, featured articles in another, and advertisements in the third.

Now, using flex properties and media queries, we can change the above three-column layout to a two-column layout.

The above CSS styles change the three-column layout to a two-column layout for tablets and smaller devices.

Finally, for mobile devices with smaller widths, we can set the following styles to achieve a single-column layout.

In this way, media queries are used to create a responsive web layout for the various devices.

Table of Contents

• Introduction

Responsive Web Design: 50 Examples and Best Practices

Website Design Andrian Valeanu • January 02, 2023 • 41 minutes READ

The number of handheld devices operating worldwide is growing exponentially. According to stats, more than 90% of adults own a cell phone, whereas almost 50% of smartphone users admit that they could not live without their devices. What can we say; the mobile web is a huge thing these days. That why in this post we write about responsive web design and show some good examples from the industry.

On the one hand, it is a good thing since we have an opportunity to address issues quickly and efficiently, locating information on the spot. On the other hand, this reality has created a challenge for all those who provide users with information.

The deal is, in the late 2000s, serving information for users was a piece of cake. You just needed several versions of the same website: one for mobile phones, the other one for desktops. However, in the 2020’s we cannot commit to supporting each new user agent with its own bespoke experience since each year, we witness new dimensions and screen sizes.

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Creating styles for each screen size is time-consuming, resource-consuming, and expensive. Even if you manage to cover all the breakpoints in the World, this will seriously overload the website and ipso facto decrease performance that drastically worsens conversions and user’s engagement with the brand, to say nothing about investing lots of money without decent ROI. So, how can entrepreneurs avoid this fate and successfully meet the fast-changing realms of digital expanses? The answer is simple – adopt responsive design.

Investing in a website whose pages are responsive and accessible, regardless of the browser, platform, or screen that your reader must use to access, is the only way to stay afloat these days. Responsive web design is no longer a tendency; it is a standard that we need to enforce to make the web a better place.

Let us take a moment to walk through the essentials of a responsive website to understand better why it is important and what you need to do to ensure your site responds to the device’s capabilities it is viewed on perfectly to let users enjoy the excellent visual experience.

What is Responsive Web Design?

So, what is a responsive website? What does it look and feel like?

According to Wikipedia, responsive web design is an approach that ensures all the pages of the website look, work and feel perfectly on any device. Whether it is a tiny old cell phone with a screen width of 320px, a modern phablet with 7 inches screen, a big iPad, or a TV with a massive diagonal line, all the main aspects such as content, design, and especially functionality should perform consistently to provide users with an excellent user experience.

In technical terms, responsive web design implies a set of instructions that help web pages change their layout and appearance to meet different screen widths and resolutions.

The concept of a responsive website appeared due to non-effective and ill-suited ways of handling screen sizes. Originally, pages were built to target a particular device. This approach implied creating a range of designs for each responsive tier resulting in different versions of the same page. However, with the mobile web becoming a reality and more and more devices with non-standard resolutions appeared, this approach has quickly become irrelevant since it could not handle this variety efficiently.

In the early 2010s, largely thanks to a gifted Ethan Marcotte, developers started to switch from popular adaptive design (an approach that implied creating several versions of one design) to responsive design (an approach that suggested only one yet flexible version of a website that stretched or shrunk to fit the screen). Although that technique was pretty new and untested, nevertheless its benefits were hard to ignore. Even now, those advantages prove to everyone that a responsive website is the only way out. Let us consider them.

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Benefits of Responsive Web Design

The main benefits of using a responsive website are

• consistent visual experience ;
• better user experience;
• no need for redirects;
• lower bounce rates;
• lower maintenance needs;
• high web page loading speed;
• no extra fees for creating and maintaining different versions;
• easy analytics reporting .

Even though responsive design is not flawless, it has its cons, for example,

• It is not fully optimized;
• It can slow performance;
• It may suffer from web browser incompatibility;
• It makes it challenging to run advertising campaigns;
• It makes it challenging to offer different things to different users depending on the device used;

Nevertheless, it had and has significant advantages over other solutions. Therefore, nowadays, responsive web design is a standard for websites.

If you still doubt responsive web design, let us find out why it is important.

Happy Responsiveness by Alejandro Ramirez

Why is Responsive Web Design Important?

The rise of responsive design has to do much with the rise of mobile devices, tablets, and smart devices like Kindle, game consoles, etc. The modern-day user expects to be able to access any website with a vast range of devices. Your website should be ready to handle any scenario. You cannot ignore these demands because numbers do not lie: according to recent studies,

• more than 80% of users surf through the internet using mobile devices in 2019;
• more than 60% of Google’s visits are done via a mobile device;
• mobile devices accounted for more than 50% of website traffic worldwide.

Your brand cannot neglect this tendency. If you cannot meet these expectations and growing demands by quickly adapting to the new reality, then you are doomed to failure, and your brand is doomed to extinction.

Let us consider some good reasons why responsive web design is important:

• Google gives priority to websites that display well on smartphones and other mobile devices. Since 2015, a responsive design with mobile-friendly behavior is a must-have for those who care about ranks in search engines.
• Consistent user experience across all devices reinforces engagement, amplifies lead generation, and boosts sales and conversions. According to studies, one in two people has gone to a competitor’s website after a poor mobile experience.
• Without a good responsive website, you may lose out on new leads and sales from the mobile web.
• It lets you reach customers and deliver messages on all types of devices (tablets, phablets, smartphones), thereby widening your target audience.
• It builds positive brand recognition and trust with consumers. According to stats, people are more likely to recommend a business with a well-designed mobile website.
• It keeps prospects on your website longer by providing a consistent experience and bringing them value on the spot.
• It is cost-effective. Responsive design offers a lower cost than creating various versions of the same website to meet multiple screen sizes. In addition, it is easier to maintain. You do not need to hire a whole agency to handle your multi-version platform.
• Last but not least, you can get a chance to stay ahead of your competition since almost 50% of companies all around the World still ignore mobile behavior and responsive layout.

Although initially responsive web design was chosen as a recommended solution due to lack of proper alternative, it has proved to everyone that it is a reliable approach with lots of benefits for the brand over the past years. It can cope with various situations and scenarios, providing a solid foundation for developers to build on and entrepreneurs to run their marketing campaigns to generate revenue and help businesses stay afloat.

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Core Principles of Responsive Web Design

To understand better responsive design, it is important to familiarize yourself with its essentials and core principles.

So, first things first – let’s find out how does responsive web design works.

How Does Responsive Web Design Work?

The idea behind responsive web design lies in building a flexible website whose content and design behave like water that fills the container, aka a device that customers use to visit the website. All elements of the website undergo changes to feel comfortable inside the screen. If it is necessary, they shrink to perfectly fit into smaller spaces or, on the contrary, stretch to occupy every inch of space. Everything scales up or down automatically to match the device.

A responsive website’s key point is to understand that its primary task is to provide a comfortable user experience for anyone. This requires ensuring good readability, proper visual experience, a certain level of accessibility, as well as maintaining consistent functionality from device to device.

In practice, responsive web design works through CSS and sometimes JavaScript plugins to cope efficiently with screen size, orientation, resolution, color capability, and other user’s device characteristics. The most popular CSS properties that help realize responsive web design are the viewport and media queries.

Key Features of Responsive Web Design

Coined by Ethan Marcotte in 2010, responsive design implied three key features that are still considered the main pillars of this concept. They are:

• Flexible layout;
• Flexible images;
• Media Queries.

We will add one more key feature: responsive typography since the content is a king that requires its dose of attention.

If you think you can do without one or another feature, then you are wrong. It may work for some scenarios; however, you could not manage to provide universal access regardless of the situation without this quartet. That is the whole point of creating a responsive web design.

Remember, not only do you need to accommodate various screen sizes, but you should also take into account device orientation since people adore switching from portrait orientation to landscape in an instant. It is here where the flexibility of all details comes in handy. Each one plays its essential role in properly serving information.

Therefore, these four features are necessary to ensure you have a fully responsive website design.

Let us consider them closely to understand better their roles, why they are so crucial, and how to bring them to life.

Responsive Animation Zhenya Rynzhuk

Flexible Layout

A flexible layout is the heart and soul of the design. As a rule, it is a flexible grid built with the relative units of measurement like percentages or em’s, rather than absolute units like pixels or points.

It is important to understand the ideology of a flexible grid that states that you need to add in a breakpoint when the content starts to look bad instead of covering all differently sized devices.

There are two general ways to implement this.

Ethan Marcotte suggested one of the legacy layout methods that was increasingly popular last decade. Its principle was to scale up or down the grid elements using the simple mathematical formula: Target size/context = relative size. This formula underlies the mechanics of layout sizes and spacing. It is applied to all child elements within your grid, making all page elements in relative units that are changed due to the course of events. While this method was pretty reliable and time-tested, there were still some imperfections.

Therefore, nowadays, developers prefer modern technologies that offer more polished, elegant, and clean solutions, like multiple-column layout, Flexbox, and Grid. While the first option requires you some extensive coding, the latter two will shrink and distribute space between the items on their own, giving you clean, hassle-free tools to create flexible layouts.

Last but not least.

It is vital to remember ordering, reordering, nesting of rows and columns to align content perfectly.

To realize this in practice, you can use grid systems like Bootstrap that already has a fluid grid or define your parameters for columns, spacing, and containers. With the invention of Flexbox , the latter option has become preferable since it gives you freedom, helps to create a lightweight skeleton, keeps your code clean, and saves you from messing with other premade solutions that can be difficult to adjust to your own needs due to restrictive use of CSS classes and styles that are hard to superimpose.

Topway Institutional Project by Arthur Cardozo

Flexible Images

Images have been an obstacle to implementing truly adaptable responsive pages since the dawn.

The deal is, use of a flexible grid in the project made us abandon our beloved pixels and replace them with relative units of measurement. This means that all elements inside the grid should follow this lead. Images are no exception. More so, by playing a crucial role in visual communication and user experience, they should first obey this principle.

However, this is not easy. To play along, images (photos, illustrations, and other graphical units) should be flexible. They should move and scale along with a flexible grid, container, or column instead of overflowing it. In addition, they should maintain their sharpness and quality. So, this is a hard nut to crack. However, there is a way out.

For the past decade, developers have come up with several techniques to resize images proportionately or show images that perfectly fit the screen without sacrificing quality; let us consider them.

Multiple Versions of the Same Image

The first method implies adding multiple versions of the image on the server. The simplest, the easiest, and the oldest but unfortunately not the most efficient way to handle this situation; nevertheless, it works.

This approach’s core principle lies in the fact that you need to upload multiple versions of the same image and dynamically serve the appropriately sized version depending on the user agent. The main flaw of this method is, of course, overload. Modern websites are visually heavy. There are hundreds of images on websites, and this number grows exponentially. Although this approach served the community in the past pretty well, today, it can be used either in limited projects or in tandem with other modern techniques that help to optimize images and use as few of them as possible.

Use of CSS’s Max-width

The second method was suggested by Ethan Marcotte and was warmly accepted by the community in the early 2010s. It makes the most out of CSS’s max-width. The idea behind that is you deliver images at the maximum size and let the browser resize the pictures deciding on their relative size based on the CSS guide.

There are two significant considerations about this approach. First of all, some browser versions do not support this CSS property, especially the infamous IE. However, the share of IE usage across the World slowly but surely is becoming negligible; therefore, you might not worry about this issue soon.

The second big issue is download times that is a much serious problem than the previous one. If the original image size is big since it is meant for large devices at the first outset, it may take extra time to adjust to smaller screens. As a result, it can significantly slow down the website and worsen the overall performance, leading to a higher bounce rate.

Nevertheless, this approach is a popular option that is pretty much reliable despite these two significant considerations.

Responsive Images

The third method implies the imitation of responsive images . This technology has been with us for many years. Therefore, there are several ways for implementing it:

• Depending on the viewport size or screen-density, you can choose the appropriate web-optimized picture from the collection and show it to the customer by using the srcset attribute in <img>.
• Depending on the screen’s device CSS width, you can choose the same image with a different cut and focus on the image’s meaningful part by capitalizing on the <picture> attribute.
• Use of image() function that allows cropping the picture differently, depending on the CSS viewport width size.

The fourth method implies using SVG. Although it does not work for photography, nevertheless the rest of the visuals, such as illustrations, icons, logotypes, etc., greatly benefit from this technology.

Each method has its own merits. Each one has its cons and difficulties in implementation. Therefore, you might find that you benefit from one or another depending on the project you need to create. What’s more, you may find yourself in situations when the best way to handle images is to turn off all of them and focus mainly on the content – believe it or not, that is also a viable way to handle this situation.

Responsive Device Animation by Miguel Cardona

Last but not least

When it comes to flexibility in images, there is one significant consideration to take into account: to find a way to adjust gracefully to new screen size and save the quality of the picture. That sometimes can be pretty challenging. You need to balance between keeping the quality and reducing the file size not to jeopardize page speed, load time, and website weight.

On top of that, you need to consider the difference between CSS Resolution and Screen Resolution. It exists on all mobile screens and even on some desktop screens. The problem is, to display sharp images to users with high-resolution screens, you need to upload an image that is up to several times wider than the regular one, aka retina-ready image . This may weigh down the project considerably. Add to this slow mobile internet connection, and you may end up with a rather frustrated and confusing user who is waiting for your image to load.  Therefore, when choosing the method for creating flexible images, make sure you consider all the crucial moments. Play smart.

Media Queries

The third key ingredient of a responsive website is media queries.

Media queries allow building different layouts within one project by tweaking your whole design or parts to best suit the screen size. With them, you can re-arrange and reorder existing elements like columns, rows, and containers using basic CSS. Based on the user agent’s features, such as the browser window’s size, orientation (landscape or portrait), screen resolution, etc., they provide different responsive tiers with a bunch of unique styles.

The great thing is that you can create multiple style sheets and define basic layout alterations to fit ranges of widths simply by combining different media queries. And they can be dropped right into a single style sheet.

A common approach with media queries is to show a multicolumn layout for large screens and reduce the number of columns one by one to fit the smaller screens. In the end, on mobile devices, the website should have one column and slide-out navigation.

Note one thing. Although browsers widely support media queries, there are still some older versions that do not recognize them. To address this particular issue, you can use the JavaScript library ( css3-mediaqueries.js ) that helps these browsers to support this feature.

Responsive Typography

Although modern websites are rich in visuals, still web design is all about shaping the written information. Content is a king. No one could argue against that. Therefore, typography, as a prime tool to serve it, is increasingly important.

In the early 2010s, when the mobile web was still new, no one thought about making typography responsive since everyone was busy trying to master fluid grids and images. Today in the early 2020’s it is a crucial part of the larger puzzle.

Check out our guide Responsive Typography in Web Design: Understanding and Using to understand it better.

Indeed, if you are up to a fully responsive website that meets all current demands and needs of the market, then scalable, fluid typography across multiple breakpoints and predefined font sizes is simply obligatory. It is just should be here, no question asked. It ensures the content legible and appealing on all devices and improves accessibility delivering information to all readers’ groups.

However, there is a catch. People tend to believe that the larger the screen size is, the larger typeface has to be. And vice versa, the smaller the screen size is, the smaller typeface has to be. At some point, this principle works excellent, but there are situations when it does not work as intended doing more harm than good.

For instance, when it comes to small screens like ones on cell phones, you need to make the typeface bigger since it is very difficult to make out words set in small font size. Apple recommends sticking to 16px size instead of the expected 12px since it provides better readability. The same goes for large monitors and TVs. You cannot increase font size infinitely; you need to find the best font size for your audience to hit optimal readability.

In a word, typography can be tricky. It certainly requires your attention. You need to invest in responsive typography as much as any other key element of a responsive website.

The good news is, even though responsive typography is relatively new and there are no standards or one-size-fits-all solution, it is still easy to handle. There are different approaches in the wild that you can try and see what works best for your project. Let us consider the two most popular solutions.

Ways to Create Responsive Typography

One of the popular and widely acknowledged ways to create scalable typography is to use well-supported browser features, basic algebra, and automation through Sass. Making the most out of simple mathematical formula, aka linear equation definition and CSS calc(), you can easily bring to life the trendline equation and ensure typography smoothly scales with your layout. If you are familiar with Sass, you can automate it simply by using a code snippet. Check out Fluid Responsive Typography With CSS Poly Fluid Sizing on Smashing Magazine for more good math-based solutions.

Another method is to use viewport units. These relatively new CSS features are incredibly handy. Just set the font size in viewport units and let the browser do its job

For those concerned about browser compatibility, the latter is pretty promising for viewports units and calc() function but still is not flawless; there is another popular and time-proven way of creating responsive typography. It uses breakpoints that you may already have in your flexible layout to set typeface in the preferable size depending on the resolution, thereby controlling this situation manually.

Whatever way you choose, make sure your responsive typography provides the best readability and user experience across devices.

STRETCH by Mat Voyce

Last but not least, responsive web design is about best practices.

Responsive web design is not just about plugging these key features in and being done. Neither is it a separate technology. It is a set of the best practices used to create a website that responds to the device, including pages that instantly adapt to a reader’s needs.

Therefore, it means you need to follow the modern technologies and employ practices that cope with the task better than the others do. The vivid proof of that is the slide-out menu . Along with the hamburger button, the slide-out menu has become a standard for responsive designs, overthrowing other old yet time-proven solutions simply by offering the best flexibility for the ever-growing mobile market.

In addition, along with seeking the best solutions for current demands, you need to test and analyze methods that you have already implemented to see whether they fit the bill since the situation is changing rapidly.

Best Uses of Responsive Web Design

• E-commerce websites: With the growing trend of online shopping, it is crucial for e-commerce websites to provide a smooth browsing and shopping experience across all devices.
• News and media websites: Users often access news and media websites on-the-go, making it essential for these sites to be responsive and provide a consistent reading experience.
• Blogs and portfolios: Freelancers and professionals can showcase their work through responsive blogs and portfolios, ensuring their content is easily accessible to potential clients and employers on various devices.
• Corporate websites: Businesses can benefit from responsive web design by providing a seamless experience to their customers and clients, regardless of the device used to access their website.

Technical Issues and Solutions of Responsive Web Design

• Image scaling: One of the main challenges of RWD is ensuring images look sharp and load quickly on all devices. To tackle this issue, use responsive images with the ‘srcset’ attribute to serve different image resolutions based on the device’s screen size. Additionally, consider using CSS techniques such as ‘background-size’ and ‘object-fit’ to scale and position images properly.
• Navigation: Designing a responsive navigation menu can be challenging, as it must adapt to various screen sizes and orientations. Employ mobile-first design principles, and consider using a collapsible or off-canvas menu for smaller screens.
• Performance optimization: Websites with a lot of content, images, or multimedia elements can suffer from slow loading times on mobile devices. To optimize performance, use lazy-loading techniques, compress images, and minimize HTTP requests.
• Cross-browser compatibility: Different browsers and devices may render your website differently. To ensure consistent display, use feature detection libraries like Modernizr and test your website on various devices and browsers.
• Managing CSS media queries: As the number of devices and screen sizes increases, managing media queries can become complex. Utilize pre-processors like Sass or Less to keep your CSS code modular and maintainable.

Difference between Responsive Design and Mobile-friendly Design

There are two basic options when deciding how you want your website to look on small devices (cell phones and phablets): responsive web design or mobile-friendly design. While some people believe that these two are the same thing, in fact, they are not. So, who is who?

Responsive website changes depending on the screen size. It uses a dynamic grid, responsive images, and typography to adapt perfectly to whatever resolution is coming its way. It gracefully refits the content to each change in screen size.

Mobile-friendly design functions the same way regardless of the device: it just does not change. Simply put, it is a mobile version of the website. Although it stays relatively neutral to screen size changes, it still has some significant benefits over responsive design. First and foremost, a mobile-friendly website is made with mobile users in mind. It means it provides the best user experience, taking into account even the tiniest details. For example, it has a navigation that is “thumb-friendly,” buttons and links that are easily tappable, graphics that is large, uncluttered design with fewer features, etc.

Responsive Design

• Improved user experience: Responsive web design enhances the user experience by delivering a consistent layout across various devices. This ensures that users can easily navigate the site regardless of the device they are using.
• Cost-effective: RWD eliminates the need to develop and maintain multiple versions of a website for different devices. This reduces the overall cost of web development and maintenance.
• SEO friendly: Google and other search engines prioritize mobile-friendly websites in their search results. Implementing RWD can improve search engine visibility and drive more organic traffic to your website.
• Increased conversion rates: A seamless user experience on all devices can lead to higher engagement, increased dwell time, and better conversion rates.

So, which one to choose? Well, everything depends on your brand, target market, and most importantly, marketing goals. Answer these three essential questions to get some hints on direction:

• What is the purpose of your website? This helps define what information is essential and what information can be eliminated to provide quick access to crucial details.
• What will visitors do on your website? This helps define what functionality is vital and how to make it easily accessible on each screen size.
• What devices do your target market use most of the time? This helps to focus on the most viewed version and provides the best user experience for customers.

Finally, bear in mind that your website should take your visitors on a smooth, frictionless, valuable, and enjoyable journey. If this journey targets mostly audiences on the mobile web, then the mobile-friendly design is your option. However, if you are up to a broad audience from various devices, then responsive design is the only way out.

My Happy Family by Shota

How to Create a Responsive Design – 3 Popular Approaches

Designing a universal website accessible to everyone and adaptable to various screen sizes flawlessly and graciously sounds bold and daring. However, no obstacle is insurmountable since the web developers’ community is always searching for the best solutions to address users’ needs and wishes efficiently.

So, what can we do? There are some excellent options in the stock for both tech and non-tech-savvy people. Let us consider the most popular universal approaches to creating responsive designs these days.

Responsive Website Builders

Website builders are a quick, easy, and flexible way to create a responsive website. They fit both tech and non-tech-savvy people by providing a comfortable environment where you can build a website from scratch without writing a single line of code. Some of them focus mainly on responsive behavior, while others take into account mobile-friendliness, offering tools for creating a fully optimized website for mobile devices.

One of the bright representatives is Startup . This award-winning website builder includes more than 300 blocks with modern styles, excellent responsive behavior and mobile-friendly features, a browser-based drag and drop editor that anyone can easily handle, and powerful customization options.

Grid Systems

If you love to code or create everything from scratch controlling each stage of development, then responsive grid systems may be right up your alley. They already have everything you may need: containers, columns, rows, classes for ordering, arranging, and nesting, some basic styles that smoothly adapt to screen sizes thanks to media queries and a range of popular breakpoints. As a rule, developers use them as a solid foundation to build on.

There are a dozen responsive grid systems in the wild: some are simple and primitive, while others are complex and all-embracing. The most notable representative of this direction is, of course, Bootstrap. It is regularly updated to use the best features of modern technologies. By now, it offers a mobile-first flexbox grid to build layouts of all shapes and sizes and a dozen of helpful utilities and assets that make the coding pleasant and enjoyable.

Last but not least. One of the ready solutions that, much like website builders, can be easily handled by non-tech-savvy people is CMS like WordPress, Shopify, etc.

Popular content management systems do not stay aside from the current demands of the web audience. Although, by default, they do not offer responsive behavior, however, those who create themes for these frameworks certainly take this into account, providing responsive templates that are partially or sometimes even fully optimized for mobile devices.

Best Practices for Responsive Designs

As we have already said, a responsive website is not a separate technology with a one-size-fits-all solution. To nail it, you need to use techniques that bring about the best result for your brand, audience, and marketing goals. This implies capitalizing on the key features such as flexible layout, flexible images, media queries, and responsive typography, as well as introducing some time-proven tips and solutions. Let us walk through some good practices that may help you create a fully responsive website that meets all your users’ expectations.

• Design the mobile website first and work your way up to the desktop version. According to stats, the mobile web is prevailing over the desktop one. Therefore, chances are your users will visit your website using handheld devices. Prioritize the mobile version and use it as a foundation to build on. More so, it is easier to scale up design rather than scale it down.
• Know popular screen resolutions. According to GlobalStats, almost 25% of visitors use small cell phones with 360px wide screens , and only 12% use laptops with standard 1366px widescreens . In addition, there is no one preferable size in each niche. This means you need to find the perfect responsive tier in each category. Use Statcounter to define what devices your target market use to determine the best responsive tiers.
• Cater to resolutions that are gaining popularity to create a future-proof user experience that will work even when the market share changes.
• Know web browser market share. Responsive design is also about adapting to the capabilities of the device hardware and web browser. Seamless experience requires your website to work flawlessly across all platforms. The harsh truth is, the World of web browsers is not perfect. There are still browser versions that do not support even the popular CSS features, to say nothing about such modern and pioneering methods like calc() or Flexbox. In this case, you cannot rely blindly on your solution. You need to adjust it according to the browsers that your audience use. In addition, it is highly recommended to provide a fallback if you want to widen your target market and serve content to every customer regardless of the web browser he or she might use.
• the buttons should be big ;
• the links should be easily tappable;
• sliders should be swipeable;
• interactive elements, key details, and navigation should be within easy reaching distance of thumbs;
• navigation should be at the bottom;
• search should be responsive .
• fingers should not block the view of the content when trying to reach navigation;
• target area should be enlarged to accommodate touching ideally.
• Do not be obsessed with the F-shape pattern. While on desktop versions, it rules the roost, when it comes to small screens like cell-phones, it is useless. People prefer exploring interfaces in other ways. As a rule, mobile users look at the center of the screen first. It is also the easiest place for them to reach. Therefore, the most critical information, including CTAs and navigation, should be there. However, when it comes to tablets and mid-sized devices, the screen’s central part is not easy to reach. Here you need to place navigation and crucial details on sides.
• Make sure you are not embarrassed with what happens in between breakpoints. Remember, not all people are going to maximize their windows to surf through your website. Your interface should be ready for such a scenario. The layout should naturally adapt as the browser resizes.
• Do not ignore landscape orientation since it is the main hindrance to achieving optimal usability and accessibility.
• Avoid bombarding the user at the small screen with all the content. Eliminate friction and focus on vital information. Do not scale down the whole design since you will end up with a long-long page that is difficult to read on small screens. Also, according to stats, mobile users are usually after quick answers. They should locate information in no time. Otherwise, they will leave. Therefore, display only what matters most to users and give them the controls to find the rest.
• Do not cling to the past. Follow the trends. Sometimes modern approaches may meet current demands more efficiently than old and time-proven ones. As proof, it is highly recommended these days to use scalable vector graphics, aka SVG. While there are various ways to ensure your images are responsive and adapt gracefully to new sizes, but why not benefit from the format that already knows how to behave in such a situation. Furthermore, SVGs often have a small file size so that they do not overload the website nor compromise the website’s speed, and most importantly, they save the quality of the visuals.

Lamps by Augustus

5 Top Responsive Web Design Testing Tools

We have acquainted with the basic principles of responsive design; however, that is only the first step. The theory is one thing, and practice is another. The next step is to grab some good tools that provide a well-crafted virtual environment where physical devices are perfectly emulated. They will help you define whether your project is responsive and give you some hints on what breakpoints to use and what elements should undergo changes to work and look excellent on selected resolutions.

Check out these 5 top responsive web design testing tools.

Inspect Tool on Chrome

The first tool in our collection of 5 top responsive web design testing tools is, of course, Inspect Tool in Chrome (it is also available in Firefox and Opera). Although this tool is not for non-tech-savvy people, it is still easy to use: the interface is intuitive, and the panel for inspecting responsiveness is easily accessible.

The device toolbar shows you how the page looks and performs on different devices. It has two modes: mobile viewport mode and responsive viewport mode. While the first one offers you a selection of popular cell phones that let simulate a specific mobile device’s dimensions, the second option is much more powerful. It allows you to play with size by stretching out or narrowing down the working area to catch the breakpoints when the layout becomes broken or content becomes difficult to read.

Mobile-friendly Test by Google

This is another tool from the Google team designed to help fellow developers to improve their online estates. Unlike the previous one, which is quite extensive and powerful in what information it can provide, this one focuses only on one type of information. It helps to find out how mobile-friendly your site is according to Google’s principles. It investigates and measures how easily users can access, read, and navigate the site on mobile devices. It grants you a score and offers some suggestions for improvements.

The tool considers such vital parameters as viewport issues, speed issues, load time, horizontal scrolling, scalability and readability of the content, touch elements, etc. Even though developers criticized the tool several years ago, today, it has many improvements and serves as a reliable platform to get insights on the mobile version of your website.

Responsive Test Tool by Designmodo

The beauty of the Responsive Test tool by Designmodo lies in its simplicity, even though it is pretty powerful. It has an intuitive interface that can be handled by non-tech-savvy people to see whether their current websites look great across popular devices and platforms. All they need to do is to type in the web page’s URL, and the tool shows how a web page renders in the different screen shapes and sizes.

Here, you can find a wide range of cell-phones, phablets, tablets, laptops, and desktops so that you can target and inspect every popular and not-so-popular device. Also, you can set your dimension and see how your web page looks in a custom size.

Last but not least. The great advantage of the Responsive Test tool that many developers find extremely useful is that it allows interacting with pages and inspecting dynamic details of the interface like navigation, sliders, tabs, etc. You can click on links, activate slide-out navigation, type into the search field, etc., to detect minor problems with the interface.

Am I Responsive?

“Am I Responsive?” is perhaps one of the oldest responsive test tools on the web. Unlike the previously mentioned here, it has a more static answer to the issue. All it does is show your web page on four popular devices: desktop, laptop, tablet (portrait mode), and cell phone. The surprising thing is, you can interact with every frame. You can open the menu, click on links, scroll down, etc.

Of course, this is not enough for developers. Still, it is a good alternative for non-tech-savvy people who want to find out how their websites render on different devices and tech-savvy people who want to take screenshots of local development URLs for reporting.

Responsive Testing

Responsive testing, a free tool from BrowserStack, shows your website on an assortment of iOS and Android devices, including mobile phones, tablets, and laptops. iPhone X, Galaxy S9 Plus, iPad Mini, iPad Pro, MacOSX, and even Kindle – the selection is pretty good. It is a great instrument to verify if a website is being displayed correctly.

Although you do not have such freedom as in Responsive Tool by Designmodo – you cannot interact with each version, and the only thing you get is a screenshot – nevertheless, it helps to get the overall picture of the online estate.

Responsive Web Design Examples

Responsive web design term is related to the concept of developing a website design in a manner that helps the layout to get changed according to the user’s computer screen resolution. More precisely, the concept allows for an advanced 4 column layout 1292 pixels wide, on a 1025 pixel width screen, that auto-simplifies into 2 columns. Also, it suitably fixes on the smartphone and computer tablet screen. This particular designing technique we call “responsive design”.

Responsive website designing is an entirely different designing version than traditional web designing, and developers (especially fresher) must know about the pros and cons of responsive web designing. This blog is a mighty example of the approach so we will reveal a few facts about the uses of responsive web designing. The basic instinct might be to choose media queries to develop a responsive site. However, the hassle one faces with media queries is that new queries can pop up from moment to moment; each time, the user experiences sudden and drastic changes to the look and organization of the site. Experts suggest using some CSS transitions to ease the jump.

Pages that include data tables pose a special challenge to the responsive web designer. Data tables are extremely wide by default, and when someone zooms out to see the whole table, it becomes too small to read. When one tries to zoom in to make it readable, he or she is supposed to scroll both horizontally and vertically to look through it.  Well, there are several ways to avoid this problem. Reformatting the data table as a pie or mini-graph is an approved solution. The mini-graph fixes even in narrow screens.

Images in responsive web designs are called context-aware. This particular technique serves the purpose of responsive designing in true sense as the images serve at different resolutions, ranging from larger screens to smaller ones. The scaled images appear to change fluidly with the help of updated developer tools and coding languages, allowing designs to look sharp in every context.

Responsive web designing is remarkably different from traditional designing in terms of technical and creative issues, and careful use of this can do wonders while designing.

Designmodo has a very clean and clear design with a perfect responsive design interface. The images and the text scaled perfectly on different mobile screens sizes.

Simon Collison

Though nowadays this greyish grid-style static website looks a bit boring and dull, however when it was released it caused some kind of furor with its high-end layout.

The main reason was that the designer primarily focused its attention on responsive behavior that was only gaining popularity those days thereby providing ordinary developers with a representative example of how regular grid-style layout should gracefully transform.

Andersson-Wise Architects

Being dedicated to an architecture and design studio it doesn’t surprising that the main focus of the website are photos that showily represent skills, experience and clients of the company.

The landing page includes 3 main sections, each of which is based on image background. The flexibility solution helps to effectively form a proper structure for every standard screen size, creating a pleasant content flow for readers.

Stephen Caver

Stephen Caver has a topnotch website when it comes to responsiveness. You will definitely ask, what so special in it. The answer is simple, take a closer look at the front page and you will see; it consists of

• huge welcoming message dished up with a help of a rough typography;
• set of huge blocks that is a duplication of the main menu on the top;
• regular layout for blogging.

So as to say, 3 essential aspects that can be found on every website. The designer gives us a hint of how typography, grid-style markup and blog section should change according to device screen dimensions.

Sparkbox demonstrates a basic structure of a corporate website. The layout is pretty simple; it is based on a standard, commonly-used set of horizontal stripes that present data in a non-intrusive manner. Such structure is really easy to adapt to various screen sizes. The sequential arrangement of blocks deprived of embellishments undergoes changes quite smoothly and effortlessly, giving users a nice-looking and well-organized layout.

Transformation from a regular left-sided blog-style magazine layout populated with numerous yummy pictures to an elementary block-by-block layout – here is how the main process of adaptation looks like in this website.

However, there is nothing supernatural; it is believed to be a typical solution to a great deal of projects that want to attract online readers from mobile web, win over new audience, and at the same time, save the website’s aesthetics from a visual overload.

The Boston Globe

The Boston Globe is an excellent example of a well-thought-out news-related website that is based on a responsive layout. The website takes on a conventional approach that is helpful for those who are eager to run its own frequently updated online magazine.

Though as befits, at first sight it seems that the website has a complex, slightly messy outward that is really hard to handle, actually the solution is really primitive. The designer has wisely split all the information into 3 columns, the amount of which decreases according to screen size, slowly but surely passing stages of displaying data in 2 columns and finally in one; in this way you will be also able to set a necessary order of showcasing your blocks.

Think Vitamin

To be honest, Think Vitamin can’t boast of anything particular concerning its blog design. It has the same markup as everyone else’s. It has 1 main column with a right-sided widgetized sidebar, a header populated with navigation, a logotype and a search bar, and a footer that presents information via set of blocks.

However, the team not just mindlessly uses a responsive framework as a base; they also actively muster support from some styling elements. Thus, a contrasting color palette helps to distinguish content blocks and some functional elements such as social media and ads, enhancing visual perception for mobile users and reinforces readability.

Sasquatch! Music Festival

Sasquatch! Music Festival has to deal with a lot of multimedia content including videos and dynamic effects that in addition is spiced up with some artistic hand-written lettering and fantastic graphics. So for the team, it is quite a challenge to display everything correctly on mobiles and tablets.

Nevertheless, the responsive behavior here is well elaborated. It neatly touches every detail, creating a visually pleasing appearance that doesn’t lose its charm of originality and creativity even on small screens.

Internet Images

This is another clean well-organized website that is based on a flexible horizontal stripe layout. The responsiveness here is also effectively bolstered by a color differentiation that visually separates one logical block from another.

Such simple yet powerful combination helps to increase readability chiefly on small devices where, as a rule, everything is presented as a one continuous data stream that, because of an inherent monotony, is able to easily destroy all the piquancy and decrease readers’ interest.

Staffanstorp

Here, an ability of a beautiful adaptation to smaller screens as well as to bigger ones brings such benefits as

• perfect readability regardless of devices that display your website;
• well-structured appearance for increasing information hierarchy;
• easily conveying messages to readers that mostly leverage tablets and mobiles.

Though the blog designs do not differ from others, yet its desire to satisfy current web requirements takes it at the whole new level.

Seminal Responsive Web Design Example

As the nameplate implies, the website serves as a perfect example of responsive design. It even has a proper title “A Flexible Grid”, so it becomes clear that everything here is riding on rules of graceful degradation. As expected, the team pays more attention to an ideal data presentation rather than to aesthetics, so styling goes into the shadows.

The demo page includes navigation, a text block, grid-style area, and even illustrated logotype, so to speak covers a minimum of integral elements. The team showcases how sizes of logical divisions and arrangement should properly change in order to provide users with an excellent experience on portable devices.

Naomi Atkinson

Naomi Atkinson leverages a mosaic-style layout for the front page. This solution is widely-used among those who want to immediately shed a light upon its artworks by creating online portfolios.

The website is worth mentioning not because of its design, since, to put it mildly, it leaves much to be desired but due to its functional side that is quite intelligent. The designer employs irregular grid that nicely transforms into a correct grid once you start minimizing your browser window. And that’s not all; metamorphoses are supported by pleasant effects that add dynamics and attractiveness to the project.

Forefathers Group

What can you say about this website? It certainly conveys a distinct, quite overwhelming impression with its matchless, sophisticated design. The team has not stinted on the artistry that manifests itself in various moments.

The website charms with its incredible retro-style typography, fantastic hand-drawn illustrations, textured background, and amazing graphics; and these all embellishments skillfully co-work with textual content that takes up a special place in the design.

So as you can see, the team has to take into account lots of details in order to turn the website into a comfortable place that will satisfy needs online visitors that surf the website via various pocket devices.

Spigot Design

Here, the responsive behavior should leave an imprint not only on a standard layout that includes grid-style and line-by-line data presentation but also on intro video, dynamic graphics and of course, menu.

Bearing everything in mind, the team is managed to provide an online audience with an elegant design spiced up with some charming effects and full of whitespaces that nicely reflect data regardless of screen dimensions.

New Adventures In Web Design Conference 2012

Being based on a flexible grid allows the organization to win over as many potential visitors as it is possible. And in this case, this quality not only contributes to the appearance of the website but also unobtrusively supports the event that it publicizes. Since the website is dedicated to a web design conference, it is highly desirable to demonstrate regular users that the team is aware of current web requirements and rigidly sticks to them. So building a website with all specifications is an important move towards success.

Illy Issimo

The responsiveness is an essential feature of every high-quality promotional website that understands rules of attraction. Illy Issimo got the hang of it and used a flexible grid in order to

• provide a pleasant user experience;
• extend a targeted audience;
• draw in potential customers that use small devices.

So as a result, its advertising campaign is certainly out in front.

Arrrrcamp Conference

The website focuses more on text rather than on multimedia. Thus, the large part of the website is based on a white monotone background that nicely underlines text and some trendy “ghost” buttons.

The front page undergoes changes once you resize your browser window; it ably supports all resolutions starting from 1920px and ending up with 240px that is really convenient since Ruby-lovers definitely know how to use tablets and mobiles in search of necessary stuff such as conferences in internet.

Robot or Not?

Robot or Not? is a demo website that puts a flexible grid in action.

Featuring an equal mix of textual and multimedia data that takes up the whole browser screen (as is often the case) and stripping away all the decorations and creative styling, the team tries to make from the regular page an excellent example for newbies that want to vividly understand basic transformations that happens with the layout when it adapts to various screen dimensions.

Earth Hour is a really advanced and complex website that is filled with lots of multimedia including both videos and eye-catching photos. Moreover, it is also an online infographic that utilizes some beautiful graphics and smooth transitions in order to draw attention to the issue.

Unfortunately, the adaptation is not well-crafted and fully elaborated, since the website suffers from some inconsistencies starting from tablet version, to say nothing of displaying on a much smaller devices such as mobiles.

The creative team resorts to an ingenious approach of using textures, fantastic drawings and illustrations in order to effectively set its company online and make it look unique and eye-catching.

An artistic side is absolutely stunning. How about an ability to skillfully adapt to competitive environment? Here is also all present and correct. Though the website is static, there are no magnificent effects or dynamic zest, yet the responsive behavior dramatically contributes to the users’ experience, saving the day.

Ribot is a high-end digital design studio which specializes in mobile, tablets and beyond – as the title says.

The key words here are mobile and tablets, it means that the team concentrates on creating designs that will be suitable for namely such devices, so it’s not surprising that the website design itself also easily blends into screens of such gadgets, nicely displaying information and providing regular online visitors with a proper way of exploring company’s services and possibilities.

Deren Keskin

Deren Keskin has a compactly arranged, clean online portfolio that obviously resorts to a rule that every web page should occupy only browser screen, even blog falls under this requirement.

The same goes to modified (according to responsive scheme) layouts, so everything is compressing until the whole structure perfectly fits into a screen regardless of its dimension. Furthermore, the designer is managed to save all the proportions and relationships between integral components in order to save and carefully identify the previously set priorities of some elements.

Sweet Hat Club

Much like the previous example, the content is tightly packed together. The newspaper-style layout is aimed to predominantly feature images since the website is an online club of those who like to wear hats.

The textual filling here is quite optional, so the responsive grid should chiefly take care of properly modifying image sizes and fitting them into new dimension. What is worth attention here is that even the mobile version of a website includes 2 columns as the original one.

At the present time the website is closed. The home page includes some information about the previous project activity, helpful links and characteristic illustrations. This is only one static web page that is reminiscent of the old days.

However the non-working status in no way affects the responsive behavior that is inherent to the website. Even now, being out of service, it continues to complying with web requirements and formally notifying users about its current status whether they stumble upon the website sitting at his computer or using a cell-phone.

dConstruct is a website dedicated to conference and workshops that take a look at perceptions of technology and culture. Though the design is quite primitive, yet the informative side is really well-thought-out. Thus, the front page draws your attention to only 3 main moments:

• speakers and workshops’ teachers;
• description about the event;

Those are the main things that worry potential visitors and need to be instantly highlighted.

Adaptive Web Design

As the nameplate implies, the website is concentrated on adaptive issues. To be more precise, this is a promotional website that advertises a book that will answer all you questions.

So it’s quite predictable that the developer leverages it as a tool for showcasing its skills through providing users with a representative example of how should a regular website behave when users come to it from various devices.

Authentic Jobs

Authentic Jobs is an online directory that is aimed to unite employers with job seekers. It traditionally displays data via a list-style layout that is quite elegant and easy to handle when it comes to adding versatility via incorporating responsive behavior.

The transformation does not cause much trouble, since the structure stays the same; the only thing that undergoes changes is a sidebar which is moved down the hierarchy by giving way to more relevant and priority data.

Five Simple Steps

The website of Five Simple Steps has a clean appearance that features only some kind of valedictory speech and a list of helpful stuff from those who previously run this website.

Staying responsive till the end is a good rule of etiquette, and the company is perfectly conscious of this. Even being closed, the website continues to meeting current web requirements and supplying its mobile and tablet readers with a perfect readability.

Splendid is a simple online portfolio that emphasizes users’ attention on artist skills and experience. You will not find neither fantastic illustrations nor ingenious effects; the designer takes a minimal approach in order to present himself, and it definitely stands in a stark contrast to other sophisticated creatives’ websites.

In this particular case, the minimal design doesn’t mean minimal functionality. The artist feels that the responsive design is and will be the primary focus, so he takes care about a proper adaptation to huge and small screens.

Ryan O’Rourke

When you run into online portfolio of Ryan O’Rourke, it seems that the designer is guided by the wise phrase “brevity the soul of wit” and realizes it literally. Minimalism, minimalism and again minimalism…there is only one web page that features one sentence, email and small gif animation that shows off his activity. However much like the previous example, the website is based on a responsive framework that makes the website ready for mobile web audience.

FlexSlider is a lightweight jQuery slider from WooThemes with simple semantic markup and numerous valuable features that was created to become your reliable companion for an ideal image showcase on every popular device.

Nevertheless, the web page that promotes the product, unlike the slider itself, is not as adaptive as it should be. Unfortunately, the team has missed this point that really disappoints.

El Sendero del Cacao

El Sendero del Cacao has a visually-appealing website with a calm and warm atmosphere that is achieved with a help of soft coloring, spectacular images and appropriate graphics. Moreover, thanks to such integral features as

• responsive layout;
• cross-browser compatibility;
• easy navigation;
• multi language support.

the website is able to unobtrusively force users to indulge in an enjoyable pastime.

Do Lectures

Do Lectures is a regular blog that makes use of a 3-column format layout that effectively copes with lots of news and posts populated with images. The website has an old-timey feeling because of its conventional markup and lack of any dynamic elements.

Coming with the retina support, the website looks fantastic on huge desktop and notebook screens, whereas on small tablet and mobile screens everything is not so rosy. The responsiveness, unfortunately, is not fully thought-out here, leaving users of mobile web with ill-suited horizontal scroll bars.

St Paul’s School

Nowadays, a great deal of educational institutions has their own websites. Even the official page of the St Paul’s School is not lagging behind others, having a website with

• an appropriate discreet appearance;
• highly informative home page;
• comprehensive navigation;
• and of course, mobile and tablet friendliness.

And concerning schools, it is really something. Having a fully adaptive well-crafted website that not only reveals necessary information but also has a pleasant design supported by flexible grid looks like a jump above its head.

Naomi Atkinson Design

Naomi Atkinson Design is a small passionate UK-based design studio that has a tightly-packed together website. The team employs a boxed-style layout with centered content diluted with minimalism that is aimed to:

• briefly but efficiently display data;
• instantly catch the viewers’ focus and draw attention to portfolio items;
• provide users with a handy instrument for quick feedbacks.

Moreover, such layout is really easy to turn into responsive one, so it’s quite beneficial solution.

Ben Handzo Photography

After casting a mere glance at the website, it becomes clear that the artist is simply obsessed with photos. The home page of his online portfolio is packed with images; there is absolutely no text, with the exception of navigation and small panel placed on footer. Moreover, being bolstered by a responsive grid that handle all the inconsistencies occurring during adaptation to smaller screens, the website brings benefits not only to the owner but also to online visitors by giving them a chance to enjoy spectacular works no matter where they are.

Stunning CSS3 Media Queries Example

As you have already noticed this is another website in our collection that is dedicated to responsive solutions called media queries that are highly popular among developers nowadays.

Of course, the design, styling and semantics are quite primitive here, however, they are not highlights; the flexible grid that plays a role of a solid foundation for this project is a true star here. The website serves as a mere example that graphically formulates the rules of graceful degradation for a standard 4-column layout.

Nordic Ruby Conference

Nordic Ruby Conference’s official website conveys a distinct sense of something really interesting should happen. Such features as:

• clean overall design;
• textured solid color backdrops;
• well-formatted layout;
• informative home page;

allows a pleasant, and at the same time, professional atmosphere prevails on the website. The responsive grid that is used as a base makes the presentation of the event available for a wide range of internet users.

Halifax Game Jam

Halifax Game Jam has a powerful artistic vibe due to its ingenious flyer-inspired home page that features a mind-blowing illustration and highly original backdrop.

Of course, the creative design helps to make your website to stand out from the crowd, but how about basic web requirements that need to have complied? The team has also thought this through, and supplied the website with:

• solid surface;
• proper optimization for browsers.

even despite of having only one page.

Diablo Media

The team has obviously built the website with current trends in mind. There you can find

• a hero area that greets newcomers;
• smooth effects;
• slide out highly comprehensive navigation;
• flat-style graphics.

They also did not miss an opportunity to add flexibility as well as supply it with some extra features that are necessary for website’s well-being in a competitive internet.

ASU Online is not reliant on an incredible design to be memorable. Being a website dedicated to a local university, it has a quite modest design that, by the way, goes perfectly well with a site’s mission. The front page depicts everything that is needed to effectively familiarize visitors with an establishment.

As far as functionality is concerned, the website sticks to such core features as:

• responsiveness;
• seo optimization;
• cross-browser compatibility.

3200 Tigres

When your task is to inform about the acute problem and draw as many attention as it possible, establishing a proper online foundation is a must have. The WWF like no other knows the rule of the game, so it’s not surprising that 3200 Tigres (one of its child websites) is pulled by such essential features as:

• modern flat style design;
• optimal information hierarchy;
• responsive layout.

Kings Hill Cars

Kings Hill Cars is an official website of a company that provides taxi services. The landing page tries to cover everything that can be of use for potential clients.

Despite the fact that the website design is outdated and quite unremarkable, it is fully adaptive. And the last feature is more than enough to increase the conversion rates for company whose targeted audience, as a rule, comes from a mobile web.

8 Faces is a printed magazine that forces its readers to speculate about typography, asking only one but tricky question:” If you could use just eight typefaces, which would you choose?”

The official website as befits is aimed to achieve a maximum exposure for its product with a help of

• clean elegant design;
• wide-screen image slider;
• ability to gracefully fit the content into smaller screens.

Asbury Agile

Asbury Agile is a conference for web professionals. As we have grown accustomed, when the event concerns web technologies and includes some high-end professionals, the official website not only has to look modern and up-to-date but also stick to some strict specifications such as

• seo friendliness;
• browser optimization.

like Asbury Agile official website do.

Alsacréations

Alsacréations is a French-based web agency that has a regular online portfolio.

Though it seems that the website craves for some kind of a “facelift” since the design definitely comes from the past with its glossy icons and boxes with shadows, however, it has one huge advantage over some others; it is based on an adaptive grid that slightly changes the attitude to it, making us (I mean potential customers) believe that at least the base of your project will meet current requirements.

Sleepstreet

Sleepstreet is a fully responsive website that is really pleasing to the eye, even when it is displayed on your cell-phone. Moreover, it can boast of such features as

• a grid-style layout for showcasing various rent options;
• a retro appearance for creating a warm and cozy home-like atmosphere;
• a multi-language support for covering a wide range of potential customers.

The responsive behavior embraces lots of aspects. Being fully adaptive doesn’t mean solely being mobile and tablet friendly, it also involves proper display on huge desktop and notebook screens. Moreover, this feature is no longer optional; every website, whether it is an online portfolio of an artist or a regular school web page, has to quickly and efficiently react on changes related to the screen sizes. There are different ways of sorting out this issue, however we are here not to shed a light upon these techniques; we just want to demonstrate how ordinary websites, which flood the internet, are capable of gaining benefits from being responsive.

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Andrian Valeanu

Andrian is a skilled web designer, email marketer, and SEO expert with over 20 years of experience. He founded Designmodo, a reputable company specializing in website and email building. Andrian shares his knowledge through guest lectures, interviews, and online publications, and is a respected voice in the industry.

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Responsive Web Design – Websites that look bad when they are viewed on mobile are non-responsive. These websites decrease the market value of the brand which is not a very good thing. That is why Websites are made Responsive now so that they can be viewed on any screen.

In this article, we will discuss What is Responsive Web Design, why Responsive Design is Important, what are the benefits of Responsive Web Design, and some of its key principles.

Table of Content

What is Responsive Web Design?

Importance of responsive web design, how to create a responsive web design, benefits of responsive web design, key principles of responsive design, best practices for responsive web design, uses of responsive web design, responsive web design – faqs.

Responsive Web Design is designing websites that contain flexible layouts that can scale itself according to the screen size of the device it is being viewed on. A Responsive Web Design enlarges, shrinks, resizes, or hides content present as per the screen size of the device. Using websites that look bad on the screen can be displeasing for the users and they might just close and stop using that specific website.

Making a Responsive Web Design can make the websites fit themselves according to the screen and is a trend that most brands follow with their websites. Some content gets hidden or some goes behind some specific gestures like drop-down or swipe left . It only uses one layout for a web page and it can be done either using CSS and HTML or CSS3 and HTML5.

If we are using websites that look the same on every screen size, it might be bad for the viewers as it can decrease their interest in the website and the brand. A brand that uses a non-responsive website loses customers as not every customer has the same system to open a website. Making your website responsive helps the brand to increase its customers from different platforms and helps them to build trust from a variety of users.

Using a Responsive Web Design for a website can help the brand to set its unique and positive identity in the market as customers can visit that specific website through different devices and the experience will still be good.

In order to create a Responsive Web Design, you need to follow the following steps:

Step 1: Using Fluid Grids

Use fluid grid systems instead of using fixed-width layouts. This allows the layout to adjust fluidly based on the screen size.

Step 2: Using Flexible Images

Ensure that images and media content scale within their containing elements by using CSS properties.

Step 3: Apply Media Queries

Utilize media queries to adjust different CSS styles such as width, orientation and resolution.

Step 4: Prioritizing Touchscreens

Make button sizes adequate for finger tapping or ensure easily accessible navigational elements on smaller screens ensuring website’s design is touch-friendly.

Step 5: Test Responsiveness

Continuously testing website’s responsiveness across different devices and browsers.

There are several benefits of using a Responsive Web Design:

• Reduces Bounce Rate: Having a Responsive Website can help the brand to reduce the bounce rate on their website as it can be viewed on any device.
• Mobile Friendly: Responsive Websites are mobile friendly as they’re designed in a way their layout changes on mobiles and tablets when they’re being viewed on.
• Increases Traffic: Having Responsive websites increases the traffic as viewers can open the website from multiple different devices and can use the website efficiently.
• Enhanced User Experience: It is one of the major advantage of responsive websites as the users can get a good experience of using the website through multiple devices which gives the brand a good look in the viewer’s eyes.
• Enhances SEO: Having a Responsive website can help the brand to rank their website higher on SERPs as the traffic and UX is good on the website.

The Key Principles of a Responsive Web Design are:

• Can be viewed on Multiple Devices: The Website should be designed in a way that they can be opened and viewed on multiple devices such as Mobiles, Tablets, PCs, etc.
• Easy to understand:  Make websites easy to understand for users so that they can use all the features without getting confused or lost. Features shoould be placed in a way that the website should look neat and every element is clearly visible.
• Consistency:  A general consistency should be maintained throughout the website for every layout size so that it looks neat.
• User Engagement:  Allowing user to explore and control certain aspects of websites builds trust of the user. For exmaple swiping for menus on mobile screen that are usually visible on the left bar on PC.

Some of the best practices for a responsive web design that you can follow are:

• Mobile-First Approach: Design for the smallest screen size possible first and then optimise the design for larger screens. T ensuring that website is accessible for mobile users, who make up a significant amount of web traffic.
• Accessible Content: Make your website accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. This includes proper use of HTML semantic elements, ensuring keyboard navigability, and providing alternative text for images.
• Responsive Media: M edia elements should be able to resize themselves to fit within the confines of the user’s device.
• Landscape Orientation: Make sure to optimise your landscape orientation to improve usability.
• Stay Updated and Adapt: Stay informed about the latest developments in responsive design, and browser capabilities to continually refine and improve your website.

Some of the uses of a Responsive Web Design are:

• Enhanced User Experience (UX): Ensures website is easily readable and navigable on any device. No need to pinch or zoom to read content.
• Lower Maintenance: Previously, businesses had to maintain two versions of their website: one for desktop and one for mobile. Responsive web design eliminates the need for a separate mobile site, reducing the time and cost associated with website maintenance.
• Faster Loading Time: Responsive websites tend to load faster, especially on mobile and other devices.
• Reduced Bounce Rate: A responsive mobile site provides a much better user experience for the visitor making them stick around for a longer duration of time and explore different areas of your site.
• SEO Advantages: A responsive websites is preferred from Google and other search engine.

Responsive Web Design is Designing website that can adjust it size of its layout according to the screen size of the viewer’s device.

Why is Responsive Design Important?

Responsive Web Design is important as not every viewer is opening the website through same device so the website should be responsive so that they can be viewed on any device regardless of the screen size.

What are some of the examples of a Responsive Web Design?

Some of the examples of a Responsive Web Design are: The Boston Globe: One of the first major news websites to adopt a responsive design. Airbnb: Offers a seamless user experience whether accessed on a smartphone, tablet, or desktop. Dropbox: Focuses on a minimalist design that is responsive, ensuring that both the content and navigation are clear and accessible on any device. GitHub: Utilizes a responsive web design to cater to developers worldwide. Smashing Magazine: A leading resource using responsive design to ensure that their articles, guides, and resources are easily accessible and readable on any screen size.

What are benefits of the Responsive Design?

Responsive Web Design helps the website to reduce the bounce rate, Increase traffic, Make the website mobile friendly, etc.

What are some Principles that should be followed when designing a responsive website?

Designs for multiple screen sizes should be made, the websites should be made so that they are easy to understand by the viewers on different screen, etc.

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Html graphics, html examples, html references, html responsive web design.

Responsive web design is about creating web pages that look good on all devices!

A responsive web design will automatically adjust for different screen sizes and viewports.

What is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive Web Design is about using HTML and CSS to automatically resize, hide, shrink, or enlarge, a website, to make it look good on all devices (desktops, tablets, and phones):

Try it Yourself »

Setting The Viewport

To create a responsive website, add the following <meta> tag to all your web pages:

This will set the viewport of your page, which will give the browser instructions on how to control the page's dimensions and scaling.

Here is an example of a web page without the viewport meta tag, and the same web page with the viewport meta tag:

Tip: If you are browsing this page on a phone or a tablet, you can click on the two links above to see the difference.

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Responsive Images

Responsive images are images that scale nicely to fit any browser size.

Using the width Property

If the CSS width property is set to 100%, the image will be responsive and scale up and down:

Notice that in the example above, the image can be scaled up to be larger than its original size. A better solution, in many cases, will be to use the max-width property instead.

Using the max-width Property

If the max-width property is set to 100%, the image will scale down if it has to, but never scale up to be larger than its original size:

Show Different Images Depending on Browser Width

The HTML <picture> element allows you to define different images for different browser window sizes.

Resize the browser window to see how the image below changes depending on the width:

Responsive Text Size

The text size can be set with a "vw" unit, which means the "viewport width".

That way the text size will follow the size of the browser window:

Hello World

Resize the browser window to see how the text size scales.

Viewport is the browser window size. 1vw = 1% of viewport width. If the viewport is 50cm wide, 1vw is 0.5cm.

Media Queries

In addition to resize text and images, it is also common to use media queries in responsive web pages.

With media queries you can define completely different styles for different browser sizes.

Example: resize the browser window to see that the three div elements below will display horizontally on large screens and stack vertically on small screens:

Tip: To learn more about Media Queries and Responsive Web Design, read our RWD Tutorial .

Responsive Web Page - Full Example

A responsive web page should look good on large desktop screens and on small mobile phones.

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Responsive Web Design - Frameworks

All popular CSS Frameworks offer responsive design.

They are free, and easy to use.

W3.CSS is a modern CSS framework with support for desktop, tablet, and mobile design by default.

W3.CSS is smaller and faster than similar CSS frameworks.

W3.CSS is designed to be independent of jQuery or any other JavaScript library.

W3.CSS Demo

Resize the page to see the responsiveness!

London is the capital city of England.

It is the most populous city in the United Kingdom, with a metropolitan area of over 13 million inhabitants.

Paris is the capital of France.

The Paris area is one of the largest population centers in Europe, with more than 12 million inhabitants.

Tokyo is the capital of Japan.

It is the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the most populous metropolitan area in the world.

To learn more about W3.CSS, read our W3.CSS Tutorial .

Another popular CSS framework is Bootstrap:

To learn more about Bootstrap, go to our Bootstrap Tutorial .

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Making Your UX Life Easier with the MoSCoW

If you’re stuck trying to move a project forward because it seems like there are too many things to concentrate on then the MoSCoW method may help you get unstuck. It’s a prioritization technique which is easy to learn and simple to apply. It can also help you decide what’s really valuable for your UX projects before you get started on them.

There are many different prioritization techniques that can be employed on design projects but one of the simplest to use is the MoSCoW method. It’s used across all business disciplines to enable project teams to work with stakeholders to define requirements. It can also be used as a personal prioritization technique.

What Does MoSCoW Stand For?

MoSCoW is an (almost) acronym designed to reflect the four categories used by the technique to determine priorities; Must have, Should have, Could have and Would like but won’t get. The lower case “o’s” are added simply to give the acronym a pronounceable form. Occasionally, you may also see the whole phrase in block capitals MOSCOW to distinguish it from the name of the city but MoSCoW is more common.

What is the MoSCoW Method?

Experts Dai Clegg and Richard Barker proposed the method in their paper “Case Method Fast-Track: A RAD Approach” and while it was initially intended to be used with the Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) it has long since been adopted throughout many areas of business. In recent times it has become very popular in the Agile and RAD (rapid application development) communities.

The MoSCoW method is most effective when it comes to prioritizing requirements in projects with either fixed or tight deadlines. It works by understanding the idea that all project requirements can be considered important but that they should be prioritized to give the biggest benefits in the fastest possible time frame.

It breaks down the requirements into four categories:

These are the requirements without which a project will fail. They MUST be delivered within the timeframe in order for anyone involved with the project to move on. In essence they make up the MVP ( Minimum Viable Product ) though it can be argued that MUST could stand for Minimum Usable SubseT too.

Should have

Should have requirements aren’t 100% necessary for delivering the project successfully but they are the “most nice to have” out of the list. They may be less time critical than “must have” or might be better held for a future release.

Could have requirements are just “nice to have” they are desirable to provide a nice user experience or customer experience but they’re not that important to the delivery of the project. They will be delivered only if there’s enough time and resources to spare to devote to them. Otherwise, they’re likely to be tabled for future releases and re-reviewed to see if they have become higher or lower priority in the interim.

These are the requirements that everyone agrees aren’t going to happen. It might be because they cost too much to implement or provide too little ROI ( Return on Investment ) for the efforts required to implement them. These are simply left to one side until they are either removed from the requirements list or become a higher priority.

The MoSCoW method provides a simple way of clarifying the priorities involved on a project. It’s most useful in time bound situations and it can be used to prioritize your own workload (usually with the buy in from a supervisor or manager if you work for someone else) as easily as it can be used for project work.

Implementing MoSCoW – A Practical Process

The easiest way to use MoSCoW is to bring together all the relevant stakeholders to the project and then:

List the requirements (on a flip chart or on a screen)

Vote on which category each requirement falls into (bearing in mind any hierarchical issues within the company itself – the CEOs vote may count for more than the votes of everyone else in the room)

Then collate the information and ensure that each requirement is presented against the relevant category in written form so that it can be used for reference by the project team

You can repeat this exercise whenever you feel it is necessary. Priorities may change mid-project or between releases. It’s important for everyone to understand what the implications of changing priorities in the middle of a project may be in terms of costs, resources, and time.

Issues with MoSCoW

It’s important to know that the MoSCoW method isn’t without its detractors. The main flaw in the method, as identified by authors Kark Weigers and Joy Beatty in their book Software Requirements, is that the method offers no means for comparing one requirement to another. This can make it difficult for those tasked with prioritizing requirements to know which category to place them in.

The Take Away

The MoSCoW method offers a simple process for prioritizing within project delivery. It can also be used to prioritize your work load. It should be used with some caution in that it may be too simple – particularly for complex projects – but it makes for a good starting point. One of the big advantages to its simplicity is that it should be easy to get buy in from other stakeholders to put it into practice.

Check out this useful study into how the MoSCoW method is used by business analysts .

You can read about the MoSCoW method as it was originally designed in: Clegg, Dai; Barker, Richard (2004-11-09). Case Method Fast-Track: A RAD Approach. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0-201-62432-8.

You can read Weigers and Beatty’s criticism and their suggestion for a more complex method in: Wiegers, Karl; Beatty, Joy (2013). Software Requirements. Washington, USA: Microsoft Press. pp. 320–321. ISBN 978-0-7356-7966-5.

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Web design and website development in Vancouver, Seattle and Calgary.

Brava Design Inc is a professional web design and web development company Servicing across the continental U.S. Brava Design Inc has been rated on Google+ 5 out of 5 by more than 20 reviewers and customers. Brava Design Inc: Re-imagining digital experiences since 2008.

We'd love to learn more about you and work together toward a profitable digital marketing strategy. Get in touch with us and one of our project managers will contact you directly.

Copyright 2022 Brava Design Inc. All rights reserved.

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Our Process.

Our clients., stay in touch..

• [email protected]
• 1-800 523 4694
• 128 7 Ave SE Unit B, Calgary, Alberta, T2G 0H5

Let's Get Creative.

• Website Design
• Ecommerce Web Design
• Enterprise Web Design 
• Pricing Estimate
• Brand & Marketing Strategy
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Competition Research & analysis 
• Business plans
• WordPress Training
• Shopify Training
• Google search console Training
• Google Analytics Training 

Website Maintenance.