Web Design has always been responsive

The hottest buzz term in the web design industry right now has to be Responsive Design. Article after article describes it as an enormous shift in the web cosmos that changes everything (!) I believe that this is web design illiteracy and a product of a vast misstep in how many people have gone about designing websites in the past.

Seeing the principle of Responsive Design as something alien and weird is a mindset that’s coming from a very narrow view of what the web is and how to design sites for it.

It’s actually easy to see how that narrow view developed over time and became the mainstream view. The way I see it, it began with the browser wars. Before then browsers were new, few, and everything got laid out in neat little tables that were easy and worked in everything available. Then the browsers diverged and consistent standards got thrown out of the window. It was really incredibly annoying trying to get something identical in everything. Often, you just simply couldn’t, no matter how many little shim graphics and spaces you stuck in to try and force it.

Rather than accept that sometimes sites would look different on different browsers (often in only very small ways), a lot of designers instead choose to “optimise” for a single browser. Designers were actually choosing to tell their customers, and client’s customers, on the homepage that their browser choice was wrong, and to instead pick the one that the designer preferred! That was obviously the wrong way to go but it persisted for a surprisingly long time.

What did we have next? We had Flash.

So what if it required a third party plugin! So what if it broke the back button! So what if you couldn’t bookmark a page! So what if it broke all the main desirable features that the web gives us! Well, it had consistency of design, not just across browsers, but also across screen sizes (which would become another factor as technology marched on). For some the supremacy of design apparently mattered more than all those practical negatives. It was easy to design for. It looked so snazzy and clients, who never actually needed to use their websites as a user would, were impressed because they knew no better. The biggest favour Apple have ever done for us is to destroy designers over reliance on Flash and the lazy, core web usability destructiveness of it.

If you weren’t avoiding the issue with Flash, you could avoid it instead by building your site fixed width. The exact number has changed over time, but the principle has become embedded. Rather than go with the flow of technology, many people stuck their heads into the sand and kept right on drawing pretty pictures at a nice simple, always the same, width.

The other major factor has been the design/development industry itself. The other articles you see everywhere lately are about the enormous chasm which apparently exists between designers and developers and, oh, how difficult it is to bridge it. Agencies seem to still overwhelmingly operate on a waterfall process. The designers spend months drawing pretty pictures of web pages, as if they were drawing brochures, which they then send to the “printers” (developers) who have to reproduce them exactly: pixel perfect. Why is it so hard for designers and developers to work together? I believe that it’s not because of an intrinsic mismatch but because the creation model that’s used is simply still based on the model for creating old media. Designers draw it up to a point of supposed perfection; then they send it to the printers to reproduce it exactly.

That’s why Responsive Design feels like it’s an alien way of doing things. The industry as a whole has spent years running from the reality that web design is not the same as print design on a fundamental level. A website is not the same as a print brochure and the process for developing it cannot be the same. Now that we have good standards in place and so many varied devices, running from that reality is no longer an option.

“Web design is not the same as print design on a fundamental level.”

It’s time to face the truth: One size, pixel perfect web design, as many designers apparently saw it, has never really existed. It has always been a fudge. The developers aren’t printers creating exact facsimiles of the Photoshop file delivered to them by the designer.

In order for developers to reproduce what looked like pixel perfect designs; they always have had to be responsive to browsers and devices. They used javascript browser sniffing, multiple css files with tricks in the code, multiple templates, etc. Even now, when we finally have standards available that help do this in a more structured way, developers still have to fudge it on some things to make it work consistently if they’re going for absolutely identical. In a few ways, it still won’t be.

What web developers do is to take the Photoshop files and completely re-design them from flat drawings to be responsive, multi-dimensional websites. Web design has always been responsive. It’s just that many designers haven’t been fully involved in that part of the process until now. The two processes have been worked too much as separate entities, instead of as an integrated whole. A designer and a developer working together design a site. There is no chasm apart from the one we create for ourselves.

The new standards which make Responsive Design possible, as we now understand it, open web design up to so many more possibilities; to the real myriad of possibilities that the web format has to offer.

The design never needed to be identical across all technology. That was a design choice, and it was a self-limiting one. We could have implemented more flexible design models at any time we choose to. Instead so many people choose a lesser view of what it could be; a view still tied to the old media conventions of the past.

What Responsive Design, as a principle, does is set web design free to be all that it can be… at last.