OS X Lion & Web Design

 » 07 Jun 2011

Amongst all the fantastic stuff announced at WWDC yesterday, and let’s not beat around the bush Apple are firing on all cylinders, the changes to how Lion deals with full screen apps has huge implications for web design.

My first thought on seeing full screen Safari was how beautiful sites look as you eliminate the window chrome as much as possible.

The other thing? How massive the canvas can now be for us web creatives. This means one thing: Responsive web design is getting even more important. It’s not just the importance of having a site work on a small phone screen (hello restaurants with flash websites!) but now we also have to think more deeply about a site will look in full screen on a 27" iMac.

This is also true of the way Internet Explorer works full screen in the preview of Windows 8 that appeared last week.

All of the sites I produce now are responsive:

If you dig into the code of the projects I’ve done over the past six months you’ll see I’ve tried various approaches. I’ve settled on an approach based on Andy Clarke’s 320 and up and broadly using the flexibility of Less Framework to plan the layouts for various screens. This process has been refined over the latest Anideo sites.

The advantages of designing mobile-first are manyfold. I find the greatest advantage is in really simplifying the design to it’s core; making sure you’re focussed on the one or two things you need a user to do on your page.

I like Less Framework as it allows me to have some great reuse given its flexible grid, and helps me prototype quickly, but doesn’t pollute the HTML with extraneous non-semantic markup.

If you’re building websites and it’s not responsive you need to start now.

But, you’re lucky. There’s a book coming out tomorrow: Responsive Web Design. I haven’t read it yet but I expect, like all the other ‘Books Apart’, it will be a must read. While you’re buying that you might also want to get Hardboiled Web Design which I consider to be an opinionated masterpiece.

Start upgrading your skills now. Something we always should be doing in our profession, but particularly relevant now.