OUGD504 - A Brief History Of... Website - Responsive Design

Responsive design is when the design responds to different screen sizes and dimensions. Responsive design has become a big issue within digital design with the introduction of various digital devices capable of accessing the internet such as phones, tablets and tv's.

Social media such as Facebook has this problem, where, because it's used all the time, it's used on phones just as much as it's used on computers. The design for the phone app heavily prioritises the news feed, and provides smaller buttons for everything else than can be done on the web page. Because of this, I find the phone app a lot tidier, although the web page is a lot more efficient.

Another form of responsive design that should be considered is how that a computer user may want to have two or more web pages open and visible at one time, for example, you might want to watch BBC iPlayer whilst blogging, and so you'd only be viewing the iPlayer website at perhaps two thirds of it's full width.

This continues into the screen where your chosen program plays. Depending on the width of the screen the video are has a few set widths that it automatically changes to until you hit the bottom set width, after which point it shrinks with the screen until the window is as thin as it's allowed to be. Because the video gets smaller in height as it gets smaller in width, more space is available underneath it for the the other bits of information, so the other bits of information take a more vertical layout as the screen gets narrower.

Conclusion

Whilst doing something that responds like the iPlayer website seems a bit excessive as first web project, I think that I could definitely consider the use of columns within the website, so that all the vital bits will fit on a half-width screen.

I also think that this will lend itself well to designing separate layouts for phones and tablets because they have a more vertical screen size.