Two must-have books for Responsive designer

I rarely buy books because so much information is available on the Internet. But I just bought two very inexpensive e-books that I am quite pleased with. I'm studying "Responsive Web Design", and since the author of the seminal A List Apart article on the subject is the author of one of the books, I decided to get it all in one place, and at this price decided to add another to my required reading list.

http://www.abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design
http://www.abookapart.com/products/content-strategy-for-mobile

Purchased! Great find!

Nice I think this is going to end up on my "To Buy List"

I've been trying several of the responsive grid templates, and I find I like the template that is built in the "Responsive Web Design" book a lot better. Very good information on fluid design, including fluid images.

Ive tried this. very impressed thus far.

http://www.getskeleton.com/

Yes, I was using that for my own site. It is probably one of the nicer "boilerplate" responsive grids. I just don't care for these rigid grids. The book develops a fluid grid, and gives you the math to develop such a fluid grid from the pixel measurements of a .psd file.

If you are really into "content defines layout" kind of stuff you should check out gridsetapp.com

A really nice tool which gives you the control over grids. And it follows (IMO) the idea of mr. Marcottes RWD philosophy on grids.

And those books are both great. I read the RWD book first when it came out. Content strategy book is still waiting.

"Responsive Web Design" is popular also in Japan!!

@sottwell I have mixed feelings re: responsive layouts. Sure, responsive is the new buzz, one web layout to rule them all, but so was Flash years ago when many websites put all their money on pizzazz over html--look where that ended up. And yes, responsive is the new "must have" that's supposed to keep us web dev folks in the clover til the next new thing...

But most websites today work just fine across multiple devices without being redesigned. Yes, you must pinch and zoom on smaller devices, but you retain all of a website's features, device browsers are way better than they were just a few years ago, and most users are used to the technique by now. As small device screens grow in size, there's less problem for many of them--my older client websites with fixed widths look and act just fine no matter how many times I flip my ipad.

Moreover, much of a website's prior functioning is sometimes lost in the transition to responsive design: link buttons and menu items may disappear in screen resizing, sites that may look great on small devices suddenly appear with oversized text and large whitespaces on wide screens, leaving the user with a site offering decreased functionality. Some popular websites have responded to responsive design by dumbing down features over all devices. Look at NPR's blogs--just a month or two ago there were richly featured, now mere skeletons that may look good on your iphone, but look like a naked dead tree on a Kansas plain on my wide-screen computer display (apologies to my Kansas buddies). Sorry to pour cold water on this party, but I see too many problems with responsive design to jump ship quite yet. Of course, my great grandpappy went down on the Titanic, so I may not have the greatest credentials. [ed. note: puffin2 last edited this post 13 years, 7 months ago.]

Indeed, I was quite shocked to see the latest version of A List Apart. The responsive purists are all agog over its grace and elegant beauty; I think it's just ugly. In everything, including web design, extremism is rarely a good thing. All things in moderation. My issue is responsive (where necessary and/or appropriate) versus device detection and separate pages or templates for different devices. It's more like creating a "print" CSS file instead of having a separate page for printing. There are getting to be quite a number of free "responsive" templates that look really nice at all sizes, so it again comes down to the design.

For example http://chamomile.sottwell.modxcloud.com (still under development, of course) is based on a free template and is quite nice at any size. And http://responsive.sottwell.modxcloud.com (still in basic concept stage; I'm a very poor designer) will look much like its more rigid counterpart.