The Post-PSD Era
bradfrostweb.comThroughout my career, I’ve watched immensely talented designers waste a shitload of time creating fully fleshed-out comps of what a website could look like. Pixels get pushed, details are sweated, pages are printed out, hung on walls, and presented to clients. Clients squawk their feedback, then designers act on it. They repeat this dance until everyone is content (or until nobody gives a shit anymore, which happens more often than you’d think). Only then do those pristine comps get handed (more like shoved) over to developers to build.
Estimated reading time: 2 min
Responsive Web Design: Missing the Point
bradfrostweb.comYour visitors don’t give a shit if your site is responsive. They don’t care if it’s a separate mobile site. They don’t care if it’s just a plain ol’ desktop site. They do give a shit if they can’t get done what they need to get done. They do give a shit when your site takes 20 seconds to load. They do care when interactions are awkward and broken.
Estimated reading time: 4 min
Brad Frost Web
bradfrostweb.comAs you can see, not too much has majorly changed. That’s intentional. I’ve spent my entire career on Big Fucking Redesigns.
Estimated reading time: 4 min
Señor Rolando recommended this story.
Content Parity
bradfrostweb.comIt’s a myth that mobile users don’t want to do everything that desktop users do. One of the biggest challenges (perhaps even the biggest challenge) in mobile web design is achieving content parity, which applies the “One Web” philosophy.
Estimated reading time: 4 min
Sebastian Waters recommended this story.
Responsive Navigation Patterns
bradfrostweb.comUltimately, mobile navigation should be like a good friend: there when you need them, but cool enough to give you your space. A bad friend is someone who’s not there when you need someone to talk to (when navigation is absent or hard to find), or someone who’s obnoxious because they’re always around and taking up space (dude, get off my couch). Finding the balance between accessible navigation and mobile screen real estate is an art that we’re all trying to sort out.
Estimated reading time: 8 min
Moritz Kröger recommended this story.
The Many Faces of ‘Mobile First’
bradfrostweb.com‘Mobile first’ in the cultural sense can also refer to the fact that for many people, especially babies and young children, a mobile device is often the first connected device they interact with and become familiar with.
Estimated reading time: 5 min
Peter Willert recommended this story.
How Much Does a Responsive Web Design Cost?
bradfrostweb.comThe fact is that responsive web design costs more…than doing nothing. Sure, you could continue building sites the old fashioned way and ignore the multitude of web-enabled devices accessing the web now and in the future. But this is 2012. At the very least a web experience should have at least some mobile consideration, and at the very most a site should be full-on mobile optimized.
Estimated reading time: 4 min
Oliver Beckenhaub recommended this story.
