It Depends...

An Introduction...

Since Ethan Marcotte's seminal peice on responsive web design we as an industry have really been talking/blogging about nothing else but.

That's a good thing. A great thing in fact. A majority of this industry have taken Ethan's idea for how to approach modern web design and ran with it. Some of us still don't think it's a 'trend' that'll catch on. Sure, like all things, in 5 years down the line we could be thinking "why we're we wasting our time?". I very much doubt that.

Another thought is that Responsive Web Design won't work for every project. This is true in part I feel.

Let's face it every project is different. Your next site build could be for the new restaurant that's opened up, a solo musicians blog or an online store selling every crayon imaginable. Could they all work with a responsive web designers approach? Probably but possibly not.

This is pretty much mentioned in Ethan's book. You've got that right? Read it yes? Good.

In the last chapter Ethan discusses the Johnny Ball (who, what, where, when, how?) of Responsive Web Design. In some cases RWD may not be the answer. I think regardless of that initial decision to use a responsive approach you should start out with at least part of the approach. Because. It may 'depend' now but down the timeline of the project something may change. If you start out with a fluid grid at least it'll help stop you having to shoehorn the techniques in at a later date. It's not much effort figuring out your pixels, your percentages and your ems and emlpoying them in your CSS.

If you think it is. Then you're just plain lazy.

Doing this at the start also allows you to 'turn it off'. You can set a media query in such a way that the site won't resize in the browser. It's a couple of lines. It's not much work.

If you think it is. Then you're just plain lazy. 

An aside.

Responsive Web Design is not the whole picture. It's only a part of the puzzle there's lots more 'stuff' to consider. Context, Content, Connection Speeds, Location. All of these things should be thought of with your design first.

This is why you shouldn't just be a web designer. You shouldn't just start being a Responsive web designer. You should start being a user centric, content first, context aware, mobile first, responsive web designer.

As ever, someone else has put this down in better words than I can muster. Check out @lukew's post on Multi-Device Web Design for a more structure point of view.