AIGA Raleigh’s Homegrown L+L / Responding to Innovations

“Responding to Innovations” was the name of the game at AIGA’s latest luncheon! Les James, senior front-end developer for Capstrat led the lecture on responsive design. Let me break this down for you: the lecture had to deal with being mindful of developing your website so it is optimized for a wide range of devices. You want your site to look and function as you designed it whether on a desktop computer or a smartphone.

James discussed using fluid grids and adaptive images when developing sites. These techniques optimize the design and user experience no matter the device. When developing for multi platform sites, columns would be a better choice than containers. This allows your layout to adjust to the display accordingly.

Content is the main purpose people go to a website, thus this is the most important aspect when designing a site. Really flush out the content with your client.

Otherwise all you have is pretty boxes

Not only should you consider how a site would look on a phone, you should design for a phone first and build off of that!

It is easier to add something than it is to take it away

The nature of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is to start with a base and build up anyway, so it is best not to fight that by working backwards. With that in mind, James went on to talk about backwards compatibility for web browsers. Let’s face it, the majority of computer users are not up to date with their machines or web browsers, so we should make sure your site won’t exclude those users.

Everyone seemed to leave the luncheon discussing how to best implement this information within their own companies and how to convey these ideas to their respective clients. It is important to stay up to date on innovations in media, and how to best utilize them. With that being said, it also equally important not to leave out the people who are not up to date with technologies. You want the message to be able to broadcast well over as many platforms as possible. Have an opinion or would you like to share your thoughts? We’d love to hear them.