After reading through A List Apart’s article What I Learned About the Web in 2011 I decided I needed to make a second effort at getting into mobile web design. This article chronicles the epic struggle between myself and the perils of designing for a screen that fits in my hand.
Part 1 will discover the philosophy behind responsive design and how to apply these new bits of brain lightning to our current processes. My odyssey will continue in part 2 as I get into the technical side of using techniques like @media queries to create a responsive design. Hit the jump to read on.
I remember very well a visit to Florida with my mother to see my aunt and uncle. One night my uncle and I were geeking out on his new computer and he showed me something I would never forget: Google.com. Given, it’s hard to avoid the existence of Google these days but what I remember about it so well was the impact it had on me. I had been using MSN Search and Yahoo! Search for so long that the simple interface seemed almost alien to me.
Today, more than a decade later, you can still go to Google.com and see the exact same page I saw that evening my uncle showed it to me with few modifications. They aimed for something and they got it oh-so-right. What makes Google different is their lack of concern about the revenue model. It’s not that they don’t care about making money but that their goal is to et the product perfect first, then make adjustments. In the early days people would always wonder how Google was going to make any money… Their response was usually, “right now, we’re focusing on how to make everything much easier to find online. In doing so, we believe that we’ll uncover a revenue model at some point.” And so they did.
Google is building a new, experimental idea aiming to reshape the future of communication on the web. It’s called Wave, and if you believe its developer, it’s “what email would look like if it were invented today.”
What’s new in Wave?
Email has been the standard in online communications for the past 40 years. You send a message to your brother about the family reunion and he responds with the date he thinks is best. It’s totally convenient, right up until the point that you decide Aunt Martha would be better able to talk to your Arizona relatives. Aunt Martha unfortunately doesn’t know that she can send the email to everybody at once and then everybody replies to you to tell you that they think there should be a game of pin the tail on the donkey and then since you CC’d Aunt Martha you get these responses like 4 times and suddenly your inbox is filled with 100 responses to your original email and you have no idea where to start…
