Author
Ethan Marcotte
Ethan Marcotte is an independent web designer who cares deeply about beautiful design, elegant code, and the intersection of the two. Over the years, his clientele has included New York Magazine, the Sundance Film Festival, The Boston Globe, and People Magazine. Ethan can be found on Twitter or on his long-neglected blog, and his most recent book is Responsive Web Design.
Also from this author
As we’ve adopted responsive design—componentizing our interfaces, establishing breakpoints, and thinking content-out instead of canvas-in—we’ve learned that there’s more to it than just changing our techniques. We have to change the way we talk about (and act on) the principles of good responsive design. In this excerpt from Chapter 5 of his new book, Responsive Design: Patterns & Principles, Ethan Marcotte explores the philosophical and practical frameworks that can guide our responsive work.
Style guides can help streamline workflows for a multi-device web. Join us for our third ALA: On Air event on June 16, when Nathan Curtis, Daniel Ferro, Cyd Harrell, and Sophie Shepherd will discuss how we can best incorporate pattern-driven design into our work.
A new edition of Responsive Web Design is here. To celebrate, A List Apart’s editor-in-chief, Sara Wachter-Boettcher, sat down with author Ethan Marcotte to talk about what’s new—and what’s next.
On Sunday, November 30, web designers and developers across the globe will celebrate Blue Beanie Day 2014, wearing a blue beanie to show their support for web standards. Join in!
The web doesn’t do “age” especially well. Any blog post or design article more than a few years old gets a raised eyebrow—heck, most people I meet haven’t read John Allsopp’s “A Dao of Web Design” or Jeffrey Zeldman’s “To Hell With Bad Browsers,” both as relevant to the web today as when they were first written. Meanwhile, I’ve got books on my shelves older than I am; most of my favorite films came out before I was born; and my iTunes library is riddled with music that’s decades, if not centuries, old.
Learn to how to make fixed-width images fluid and how to add them to your fluid grids to build a site that responds to the size of the viewport without sacrificing aesthetics. We are delighted to present an excerpt from Ethan's new book, (and the fourth title from A Book Apart), Responsive Web Design.
Designers have coveted print for its precision layouts, lamenting the varying user contexts on the web that compromise their designs. Ethan Marcotte advocates we shift our design thinking to appropriate these constraints: using fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries, he shows us how to embrace the “ebb and flow of things” with responsive web design.
How awesome would it be if you could combine the aesthetic rigor and clarity of fixed-width, grid-based layouts with the device- and screen size independence and user-focused flexibility of fluid layouts? Completely awesome, that's how awesome. And with a little cunning and a tad of easy math, ALA's Ethan Marcotte gets it done. We smell a trend in the offing.
To validate or not to validate; that is the question. A List Apart's own Ethan Marcotte helps us to re-examine our approach to standards advocacy and how we can better educate our clients on the benefits of web standards.
