Ethan Marcotte is the designer who coined the term 'responsive web design' four years ago in an A List Apart article that was shortly followed by a descriptive book on responsive theory and practice. (If you're not sure what it is then check out Get Started with Responsive Web Design).
More recently he's teamed up with with Karen McGrane (author of Content Strategy for Mobile, published by A Book Apart), launched a site that links together workshops, public events and a podcast, simply but beautifully.
Perfectly aligned with Marcotte's book branding, Responsivewebdesign.com the site sets speed as its first concern, says Marcotte. "Performance was a priority for us. I set up a simple performance budget, and it was actually freeing to view the site's design through that lens. There's still plenty of work we can do, but it's satisfying to see how quickly our site loads over a spotty 3G connection."
"We're using Grunt to manage common tasks and a number of Filament Group-produced utilities to keep progressive enhancement and performance front-and-centre," adds Marcotte. He also mentions such tools as grunticon, grunt-criticalcss, CSS and JavaScript loaders, as well as fixed-fixed.js.
The result is a beautiful and faultless example of responsive web design in action – and a great resource on the subject to boot.
Words: Karolina Szczur
Karolina Szczur is a designer, developer, photographer and writer at &yet. She's also an open source aficionado and runs CSSConf in Oakland, California.
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