The state of responsive images

I have a complicated relationship with the img tag.

I should say up front that the img tag will always hold a special place in my heart. I mean, we've had a lot of good times together. The gifs – oh, the animated gifs! How we would laugh, watching loops of cats falling off household furniture.

Things change, though. I've changed; the web has changed. More importantly: users' browsing contexts have changed, and radically. People are accessing the web on a staggering range of devices: phones with more computing power than the average space shuttle, ultra-high-res tablets and enormous televisions. As a result, many of us have changed as designers and developers, both in terms of our philosophical approaches to the web and in terms of the techniques we've developed as a result. Responsive web design gives us an incredibly powerful set of tools for handling uncertainty, allowing us to take huge strides toward delivering content to users in a way that seems bespoke for any browsing context. Thanks in no small part to responsive web design, we've begun to eschew the static-width comfort zones we've been trying to impose on the web for years – 1024px, 960px, 320px, and so on – and we've started to embrace the flexibility that has been inherent to the web all along.

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The Creative Bloq team is made up of a group of design fans, and has changed and evolved since Creative Bloq began back in 2012. The current website team consists of eight full-time members of staff: Editor Georgia Coggan, Deputy Editor Rosie Hilder, Ecommerce Editor Beren Neale, Senior News Editor Daniel Piper, Editor, Digital Art and 3D Ian Dean, Tech Reviews Editor Erlingur Einarsson and Ecommerce Writer Beth Nicholls and Staff Writer Natalie Fear, as well as a roster of freelancers from around the world. The 3D World and ImagineFX magazine teams also pitch in, ensuring that content from 3D World and ImagineFX is represented on Creative Bloq.