Responsive Design

DISCLAIMER: This is more of a sorta-informational, sorta-rant post.

Responsive design has been made possible with the media queries that CSS3 brought, and it's super awesome that you can make your design shift to the screen size that you're using instead of having a mobile site and having to design a separate mobile site entirely.

Personally, I don't like to make designs responsive because it takes so freakin' long to override all of the styles that you had originally put in place for the design to work on a normal screen. Once you start to get to smaller screens, all of your custom-width items have to be resized instead of just having a cascading effect to fix those when using a percentage width.

The one big thing about mobile design is touch interactivity. Hover events no longer have their splendor or functionality, so if your site depends on any sort of hover event, you'll have to think of a workaround for that particular functionality. There are some things that open new possibilities with touch devices, such as a long tap, double tap, slide, etc to replace some of the missing functionality that your desktop version may have.

I like CSS frameworks like Twitter's bootstrap because it's already all ready to go with widths and responsiveness. Column grids are fantastic if they're responsive.

What are your thoughts on responsive design?

I believe responsive design is important. You simply need a version of your website optimized for mobile devices. And the alternative of serving different versions through php has more downsides than responsive design especially since search engines love responsive websites.

I hate Bootstrap! You only use classes to do everything and all pages using it look basically the same... I can see it increase productivity and shorten the time needed to create a page which is why I understand people using it. But I currently don't have to maximize productivity when working on a project and thus I much rather learn more about how it works.

I believe responsive design is important. You simply need a version of your website optimized for mobile devices. And the alternative of serving different versions through php has more downsides than responsive design especially since search engines love responsive websites.

I hate Bootstrap! You only use classes to do everything and all pages using it look basically the same... I can see it increase productivity and shorten the time needed to create a page which is why I understand people using it. But I currently don't have to maximize productivity when working on a project and thus I much rather learn more about how it works.

So, you're saying that you don't setup some global classes to be used so you don't have to constantly re-declare that particular style? That's all that bootstrap does, has a bunch of global styles that can be left pretty barebones or added on to with other global styles available.

I do agree that all bootstrap sites look the same, but if they're used just for the components, and not the design, then that's much better.

So, you're saying that you don't setup some global classes to be used so you don't have to constantly re-declare that particular style? That's all that bootstrap does, has a bunch of global styles that can be left pretty barebones or added on to with other global styles available.

I do agree that all bootstrap sites look the same, but if they're used just for the components, and not the design, then that's much better.

Ahh you got me there ^^ I do set up classes for projects, so things look the same throughout all of it. You are probably right. It should be used for components and than you add your own style. I am just a "I wanna do it all myself" kinda person.

So, you're saying that you don't setup some global classes to be used so you don't have to constantly re-declare that particular style? That's all that bootstrap does, has a bunch of global styles that can be left pretty barebones or added on to with other global styles available.

I do agree that all bootstrap sites look the same, but if they're used just for the components, and not the design, then that's much better.

Ahh you got me there ^^ I do set up classes for projects, so things look the same throughout all of it. You are probably right. It should be used for components and than you add your own style. I am just a "I wanna do it all myself" kinda person.

I'm totally with you there on wanting to do everything by yourself, not being bloated with more css than what you're actually using.

But for little placeholder websites, bootstrap is great.
I'm wanting to work on a CSS framework for myself (and others, of course) that is super basic stuff that builds off of the html instead of classes, but don't get me wrong, there will definitely be classes because there is always a need for classes.

I'm totally with you there on wanting to do everything by yourself, not being bloated with more css than what you're actually using.

But for little placeholder websites, bootstrap is great.
I'm wanting to work on a CSS framework for myself (and others, of course) that is super basic stuff that builds off of the html instead of classes, but don't get me wrong, there will definitely be classes because there is always a need for classes.

I actually did something like that. Many of my recent projects used a tile-based layout and I created a minimal-framework for that ^^

It just organizes tiles and makes them responsive.

I'm totally with you there on wanting to do everything by yourself, not being bloated with more css than what you're actually using.

But for little placeholder websites, bootstrap is great.
I'm wanting to work on a CSS framework for myself (and others, of course) that is super basic stuff that builds off of the html instead of classes, but don't get me wrong, there will definitely be classes because there is always a need for classes.

I actually did something like that. Many of my recent projects used a tile-based layout and I created a minimal-framework for that ^^

It just organizes tiles and makes them responsive.

Metro tiles are always fun to play with. :)