Responding to Responsive Web Design

This article originally appeared on joecritchley.com

‘Responsive Web Design’ has started to shape the way designers and developers create sites and applications. I’ve often heard it mentioned in meetings with clients; explaining it as a lever for fundamental design decisions.

But I now feel like it’s time for it to evolve into something else entirely.

Initial intentions

Briefly going back to May 2010, when the term was coined by Ethan Marcotte, there’s no denying that he was restricting the idea (at that point) to device’s size. Utilising CSS3 media queries to modify a page’s presentation to the user. Yet still, this is massively inspiring, and has sparked many debates in the design community.

Have we responded?

But nearly 2 years later… have we responded with our own ideas to what Ethan has proposed? I don’t think we have. We have a narrow mindset, sticking to media queries...