Mark Boulton on defining responsive web design:

We’ve heard this line time and time again over the past couple of years. You see, responsive design is a useful term and one that will stick around for a while whilst we’re going through this change. How else do we describe it, otherwise? Web design? I don’t think so. No board member is going to get behind that; it’s not new enough.

Jeffrey Zeldman on Evolving Responsive Web Design:

Some commenters want to use initial-capped Responsive Web Design to mean responsive design as Ethan first defined it, and lowercase responsive design to mean an amorphous matrix of exciting and evolving design thinking. Lyza says soon we’ll stop saying Responsive altogether, a conclusion Andy Clarke reached three years ago.

Jeremy Keith got a little hardboiled yesterday. I particularly like this paragraph that echoes everything I’ve been saying for years about setting wrong expectations:

Loz Gray reflects on his eighteen-months working with the Guardian on their responsive site. There is so much experience here to learn from.

A balanced view on performance versus beauty by proud Welshman Ashley Nolan:

One of the most important elements in our recent redesign is our new portfolio. We ran out of time during the redesign week and couldn’t include all of the portfolio pieces we’d planned. This week we’re adding more and while we were doing that I discovered something I hadn’t known before about large images and iOS.

Bob Asbille asked me this week if my Hardboiled Web Design book is worth buying by someone who’s looking to learn about responsive web design.

Matt Stow has been documented device viewport sizes and the result is a handy, searchable reference of platforms and device dimensions. If you have a device that’s not listed, you can check it’s sizes and add it here.

This post is an extract from my chapter in Smashing Book 3, titled ‘Designing Atoms and Elements’ written in March 2012.

Has a client ever said to you:

“I don’t like the design”?

Last month I moved off Adobe’s Creative Cloud and back to a ‘boxed’ version of Creative Suite – laughably just in time for Creative Cloud to be the only way to use Adobe applications in the future. One of the casualties of the move was Adobe Edge Inspect, a tool that I have used and liked for testing designs across multiple devices. So today I downloaded Ghostlab and so far it looks promising.

A year ago I travelled to Oslo in Norway to teach a two day responsive design workshop at FINN. The team there have (obviously) been working hard and yesterday they let me know they’d a new responsive design. It looks great

The Stuff and Nonsense nutty boys header is pretty tall and I decided I wanted to reduce its height for small screens, such as phones, in landscape orientation. When I wrote the CSS to make this happen I made some nutty assumptions. In the spirit of sharing our mistakes:

Jordan Moore (who wears rattlesnake skin shoes) on how to give users the option to “Toggle a Responsive Design On and Off”:

If you listen to Unfinished Business, you’ll know that I’m a big, big fan of Hammer For Mac, the app its developers say lets you create HTML builds & templates quicker, more efficiently & more conveniently. Hammer works for us because these days we mostly deliver static HTML and CSS templates, instead of static visuals, and we rarely develop complete sites.

For anyone who read my I don’t care about Responsive Web Design (from two years ago) and missed the original reference (from almost ten years ago) and therefore the point I was trying to make; that responsiveness should be something we build in, not bolt on.

• Add your URL to the input field
• Click GO (reloads the preview) or press Enter (reloads the page)
• Admire your good work

A little bit of responsive fun from Brisbane based Justin Avery. (Via Jordan Moore who has a name like a country singer but has never drunk moonshine.)

I thoroughly enjoyed hosting another Fashionably flexible responsive web design workshop at New Adventures on Wednesday. I got the feeling that everyone enjoyed the day. I know that I did.

Britain’s first independent television channel, ITV, unveiled both its new logo and a responsive new home page today. I’m a fan of the curvy new logo and how it changes to match a backdrop. The home page is full of thoughtful details too, made all the more interesting to me because my work at STV (the Scottish franchise for ITV) over the last year has tackled many of the same problems.

Good work by Brett Jankord:

You can replace, the min–moz-device-pixel-ratio, the -o-min-device-pixel-ratio with a resolution media query. You can also just remove the unprefixed min-device-pixel-ratio.

Yesterday, my friends at ISO and I were discussing the impact that their social media icons have on the performance of their site. (Short story, they add 14 seconds to the rendering time of every page.) Then last night I found SocialCount (via Brad Frost.)

SocialCount is a small jQuery plugin for progressively enhanced, lazy loaded, mobile friendly social networking widgets.

Funny how the universe works.

It is possible to make any HTML element scale its height proportional to its width.

I’ll use the heck out of this.

Two great reads this week, on connected subjects:

Jordan Moore (who wears crocodile skin shoes) made a handy little tool for “showing what @media features your device can and can’t see.”

A jQuery plugin that:

Grabs all your HTML, and resizes it inside the browser when you click the width you want.

Potentially useful as a demonstration as well as a development tool. As well as a set of fixed (device derived) widths, I’d love to see the ability to add any width. I’m sure Jeremy would like it written in plain Javascript too.