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Return to the garden

(or: Designers Assemble!)

 

I shouldn’t need to declare support (again) for the pursuit of responsive web design as the future for online design. What irks me though is not so much a sense that visual design is being compromised in order to achieve a responsive outcome, but that the fact is not being acknowledged.

For what it’s worth I’m writing from the standpoint of working in a sizeable agency on many projects where RWD is not a practical option based on such factors as functionality and user profiling. You can take much of what I offer here as my opinion only, but my firm belief is that it is not mine alone.

Yin without a yang

I’ve written before about the difficulties of implementing responsive solutions in a commercial environment. As evidenced in James Young‘s excellent collation of “problems from the coalface“, designers are having mixed experiences in the transition to RWD – a situation I feel is inadequately represented in online conversations. The overwhelmingly positive spin accompanying a responsive site launch creates a subtle (but tangible) pressure on conscientious designers to ‘step up’ and deliver RWD on their own projects. Which would be fine, but the inference that RWD is desirable at any cost.

So here is a conundrum for designers that I will pretentiously moniker ‘the RWD Paradox’:

Forced to choose, what is less desirable: a visually mundane but responsive website, or a highly engaging fixed width site?

Obviously I distort for effect, but I believe that this is the uncomfortable truth for a large proportion of designers trying to pursue a responsive approach. The underlying point of RWD is that all resolutions and viewport sizes are important; it’s not just preordained screen sizes that should be accommodated. That being the case, why do many responsive sites create visual anomalies at certain sizes that we would normally find unacceptable in any other context? And if this as a natural consequence of applying RWD, then lets at least admit it.

Think outside the box (model)

It has further been suggested by more than one industry colleague that RWD promotes ‘boxy’ design, where a facet of the site’s visual appeal – part of the ‘personality layer‘ – is sacrificed to easily scaled, easily manipulated blocks. This is clearly manifest in at least one high-profile brand’s recently launched site.

Now, this is not to suggest that RWD precludes great visual design. Not at all. There are many examples of a successful marriage of the two, but they appear to be in the minority compared to the plethora of single-column portfolios or blogs that have little relevance to large consumer-facing sites.

Ding-a-ling

Suppressing these issues will only exacerbate them. And yet we resize our browser windows, ooh-ing and aah-ing at every cute little piece of javascript that animates resizing images while missing an important point – users don’t care. Users want a coherent experience relevant to their situation at any given time. Designers and developers are the only people I know who sit and accordion their browser window to see how a site will respond. We’re too in love with technique because we know that somewhere, another designer or developer is going to think it’s cool. And folks, when it gets to the point when we are designing for other designers, that should ring some pretty loud alarm bells.

Return to Eden

So what should be done? We need look no further than relatively recent history for inspiration.

Dave Shea‘s CSS Zen Garden marked a sea change in online design. The site, if you are unfamiliar with it, accepts CSS submissions and applies them to a core HTML file, demonstrating in a simple and powerful manner how separating content from presentation creates a beautiful and effective flexibility. In 2003 it enlightened many designers, myself included, and put the argument for the jump to CSS beyond debate. More than that, it coalesced the design community in a way that circulating links on Twitter does not.

“Just sowing seeds..”

We need a new garden for responsive web design. Mediaqueri.es is great as an initial eye-opener for those unfamiliar with the idea of adaptive layouts, but we badly need something to give designers the opportunity to pool ideas and resources and begin raising the bar for RWD. Not a new idea I freely admit. However while it may have been hinted at, and the original Zen Garden used to illustrate adaptive potential, I have not found a straight call for a new ‘Garden’. So this is it.

We can and should learn from experience in order to forge a better future for web design. That, and be a little more open on occasions when quality has taken a back seat to technique.

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