Responsive Design: Patterns & Principles

A Book Apart #15

by Ethan Marcotte

As responsive design evolves, we have a critical need to think about design challenges beyond mobile, tablet, and desktop. When properly designed and planned, design patterns—small, reusable modules—help your responsive layout reach more devices (and people) than ever before. Ethan Marcotte shows you just how that’s done, focusing on responsive navigation systems, resizing and adapting images, managing advertising in a responsive context, and broader principles for designing more flexible, device-independent layouts.

Genres: Design, Nonfiction, Website Design, Web, Technology, Programming, Reference

169 pages, ebook

Published November 18, 2015

About the author

Ethan Marcotte is a veteran web designer, speaker, and author. He’s perhaps best known for responsive web design, helping the industry discover a new way of designing for the ever-changing Web.

His most recent book is You Deserve a Tech Union .

Reviews

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ethan Marcotte always has a great way of explaining complex topics. A mix of academic precision with a flair of humor, Ethan puts together a book that breaks down the concept of pages into the design systems and patterns we're noticing taking place in our designs. Breaking out from seeing breakpoints as just "mobile", "tablet", and "desktop", Ethan encourages readers to see passed that fixed language and calls for us to build a design language as flexible as the web. Concise and too the point Ethan provides real-world examples and code samples to match in helping you put together lightweight solutions to responsive design problems.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short and focused. Not a ton of new content for me; I think I must have read excerpts or related essays online before. A more intro book, and I might reference it for some patterns on future projects. The historical context of online advertising was interesting.

[Ellen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ethan Marcotte is one of the web design greats. Unfortunately at this point, the book is a decade out of date and relies almost entirely on code snippets and screenshots rather than bigger themes of how to design for responsive websites. It was more like a long blog post for front-end developers than a dive into theory and mindset as I had hoped it would be.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the approach to different problems, but I was anticipating a bit less code and a bit more depth of situational problems. DEFINITELY a good read for developers. Not really new information for the UX designers staying shy of development. (I used it in my UX class.)

[Venkatesh-Prasad · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good book about common patterns and principles involved in responsive design.

While I doubt the coverage of patterns is exhaustive, most of the covered patterns are very common (I used some of them recently), and the commentary about pros and cons of the patterns is good.

As for principles, these are kinda sprinkled in with the patterns when they are pertinent to patterns and also discussed holistically when they are more about responsive design and not pertaining to a specific pattern. I liked this part the most as it talks about the whys of responsive design and process. Understanding this will really help web designers and developers really appreciate, embrace, and ace responsive design.

[Stephanie Francis · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with most A Book Apart titles, this is a concise, solid all-rounder covering the most challenging aspects of designing for multiple contexts. A companion workbook going deeper on some of the key chapters would be great but it points to a lot of useful external resources.

[Tobias Skog · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read if you're working with responsive sites in any way. I highly recommend reading the epub version with embedded videos — they do a fantastic job of illustrating the examples.

[Arnold Saputra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book for designing a responsive website. Ethan gave best practice with very simple explanations. If you are a designer, front end web developer or PM you should read this book. It'll not taking lot of your time to understand responsive web.

[Fred Rocha]

Written by the man who coined the term, ie, a must read.