I finished this book a few weeks ago, but never got around to writing about it.  I loved it though!

Ever since I came across the idea of responsive design, I’ve been fascinated with it.  I just think it’s such a neat idea, and it seems so obvious after you hear about it.  After I finish the Infinite Parallax experiment I’m going to make a responsive layout for BaconFriedRice!  Yes, two years later, I’m finally going to actually work on it! (For real!)

Anyway, Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte is amazing, especially because it is written by the guy who came up with the idea in the first place.  Just like all the other A Book Apart books, the writing tone is awesome, and the content tells you things you can do to create a responsive site right now.  He shows you how to do it by creating an example page that you can actually go view and play around with.

One thing I really like that Marcotte says is that a web designer’s canvas is the browser (page 3).  However, unlike other art mediums where the canvas is precisely selected beforehand, the browser continually changes, and you can’t rely on a consistent format, which make web design pretty challenging.  I’ve never thought of it that way before, but now I view it all in a whole new way.

Marcotte sees three ingredients of responsive web design, and breaks up the chapters accordingly: 1) a flexible, grid-based layout, 2) flexible images and media, and 3) media queries (page 9).  I won’t go too much into exactly what he says in the book, but I found it extremely helpful.  He breaks down the steps he takes to make a layout responsive, which makes it pretty easy to follow, and it seems like it’s not too hard to break into creating responsive designs.

Basically: read this book!

Also, he made an “over 9000” joke :) He put comments above some media query breakpoint examples: “Default, linear layout”, “Small screen!”, “Desktop”… and “IT’S OVER 9000”!

Just read it!