Wow. What a waste of my click! :) your (rather short) post is confusing - you don’t care about responsive design, but at the same time, any design that isn’t responsive is not web design?

And I have to disagree with you on that second point too - not all web design needs to be responsive. As a perfect example, browser-based games. Some, even most, require a certain amount of screen space to accommodate the features said game offers. So… it isn’t a website because it isn’t responsive? Because it doesn’t adapt to different form factors?

At the other end of the scale, what about an app initially developed for the iPhone that requires very little UI, very little screen space. Does this mean that, in order to use the app on a desktop PC, more content must be fathomed from nowhere in order to justify a bigger design?

As somebody who is regarded as a leader in our industry, I implore you to consider what you say a little more thoroughly before you post prose like this.

On a lighter note, I do understand what (I think) you are getting at - that responsive web design should not be considered an additional feature to a given site, but more of a standard feature, to be considered from the outset. I completely agree - when it is necessary.

There are too many devices with too many different browsers and far too many features to argue about this, really.

If you’re not designing your websites to be responsive _by default_ then you’re either stuck in the 90s or you’re simply not a designer. Web designers need to make graceful degrading a part of their routine, we need to really grasp the idea that “not everyone will be able to see this awesome hover effect,” or “this animation won’t even show up on screens smaller than my netbook.”

Take the advice to heart, if you haven’t seen the continuing variety of web-accessible devices that are showering over consumers like a wave, you’ve already missed the boat.

In other words, do your job. Bringing up a new buzzword that tries to solve the same old problems should be old-hat by now and spotted for what it is. This is not coming from a web designer. I don’t claim to be but I am tired of the group mindset when they latch onto anything that’s perceived to be new.

Sometimes you need a good buzzword to get things moving. If anything, ‘responsive design’ has gotten a lot of attention and guided people to look at things that maybe they weren’t aware of. Personally, I don’t love it when people throw around flashy new words, but I think that the cumulative affect of designers and coders awareness of the these newish techniques will benefit the space. We, as communicators, shouldn’t underestimate how a catchy word or phrase can knit together and advance bigger concepts. How many books on our shelves have some past or current buzzword in the title?

Strange post: you plainly do care about responsive web design… you’ve just picked an oddly convoluted way of saying that it’s an important aspect of the craft.

Given that Jeremy Keith is commenting here, wouldn’t you say that Responsive Web Design is just as useful a handle as Plain Old Semantic HTML? “Even if you decide not to use the POSH label, you should definitely be embracing the POSH mindset” seems particularly à propos here…

Both are simply convenient shorthand for the techniques and methods we use to build stuff. No need to sound contrary.

Taking proclamations on the internet literally is a dangerous thing. Those of you who don’t understand the post should probably read Andy’s book to understand his point of view. It’s like saying ‘I don’t care about Web 2.0’ while working on Facebook… The slogan/buzzword doesn’t matter but if it helps propel us into doing something we should have been doing all along, then great. Everybody wins.

Mr. Clarke, you’re such a rabble-rouser. What you seem to be saying, essentially, is that you care about “responsive web design” so much, that for you it’s not a separate knowledge set, simply something that is inherent to designing for the web.

Excellent point. But try not to come down on us web designers too harshly. I think most of us are doing our best to get by with the inadequate education and broken processes we learned from the supposed mentors of our college education and first jobs in the industry.

If it takes a buzzword to get the point across and that ultimately improves the profession, I think that’s OK. For example, I saw Ethan Marcott speak about and demonstrate Responsive Web Design last year and was completely enthralled. Thanks to the techniques I learned, I’ve since launched my portfolio site with a responsive layout. It was quite a learning experience that will undoubtedly improve the quality of every site I build in the future.

Touche sir.  I agree 100%, now if we can get every designer on the same page, the web would be a better place.

I believe the original architectural ‘responsive design’ concept was about buildings responding to the warm humans within them, not to some more-or-less constant physical constraint.

I’m pleased to know that no web designer would even think of designing a site that doesn’t respond to the size of the glass. But that’s about as enlightening as learning that architects try not to ignore the effects of gravity.

But to be truly ‘responsive’? I believe that requires an understanding of the human on the other side of the screen, and, most importantly the context they are in.

Web designers have been spoilt for almost 15 years because that context was always more or less a constant. (Sedentary humans, with space, time and probably patience). Mobile web adoption puts that assumption back under the spotlight and encourages us revisit all the patterns it begot.

So the most important thing about a mobile user is not that their device-width<960px but that this contextual variable is no longer a constant. Moving, abroad, hurried, lost, bored… perhaps clichéd adjectives to describe your mobile users, but still quite different to those normally applied to classic web personas.

I know I keep banging on about this stuff, but it is still slightly depressing to discover beautiful fluid design, clearly intended to work well on mobile devices, which then fails to provide a prominent click-to-call link, for example, or which expects mobile users to download and fill in Microsoft Word documents. Did a web designer really think that phone users didn’t want to use the, er, phone? Or that they had the means and interest to complete a Word document on it?

Responsive web design is great for what it does. But it sometimes seems as though designers think that using it then absolves them of having to apply any further thought to their mobile users. And that is a real shame.

So I applaud your feigned ignorance of responsiveness (given its received meaning) but I would love to hear a discussion about what responsiveness could *really* mean, and how these new types of users and their variable contexts might, or deserve to, get addressed in a contemporary and intelligent way.