During the last week I was at the Webshaped conference listening Stephen Hay’s talk about responsive design workflow. This post isn’t going to be strictly about that, but as Stephen’s way reminded somewhat the way I work myself, it made me want to write down some thoughts about my own workflow and how it has evolved during the past two or three years and how it might still evolve in the future.

Last year I wrote about a promising approach to multi-device Web design that enhanced responsive web design techniques with server-side solutions. Since then the idea, which I dubbed RESS (Responsive Web Design with Server Side Components), has been gaining popularity and a number of developers have written about how they're using it. Hopefully these resources are useful to anyone interested in learning more about RESS.

How do we reconcile a pre-parser that wants to know what size image to download ahead of time with an image technique that wants to respond to its environment once the page layout has been calculated?

For designs to be truly responsive, we need to move beyond flexible grids and media queries. John Yuda outlines five building blocks for the future of RWD

Last year The Boston Globe suddenly shed its old media reputation by launching what’s been called the world’s best-designed news website. We spoke to the Globe’s Digital Design Director, Miranda Mulligan, about design’s role in web journalism.

The Blessing. Fragmentation allows users to take their pick from thousands of devices. You can choose from phones with 3D screens, projectors, CDMA, GSM, or even CDMA & GSM. You may not care that Tag Heuer has made an Android phone but at least one person does (and they use OpenSignalMaps). It's a triumph for Android that as a single OS it can target so many markets.

The Curse. The proliferation of devices with their associated screen sizes, internal hardware and custom ROMs creates some difficulties. We spend a lot of time making the app presentable (or at less functional) on exotic devices - this is the most common request we get from app users.

The Study. Over the past 6 months we've been logging the new devices that download OpenSignalMaps, we've based this study on 681,900 of these devices. We've looked at model, brand, API level (i.e. the version of Android) and screen size and we've tried to present this in the clearest form we can.

Chances are, you're going to want to execute some code based on media queries in your snazzy responsive layout. At Springload we started by doing this with the window.matchMedia() function. It worked pretty well, but it always felt a bit, well.. inelegant. The problem was, we had to set our media queries in our Javascript as well as in our CSS files. This made our geeky department very nervous, so we struck out in search of a better, simpler way that didn't keep our developers up at night in a pool of cold sweat.

As more organizations realize they need to invest heavily in multi-device Web designs, the inevitable question of “how” comes up. Responsive Web design, separate sites, or something in between? Here’s how I’ve tried to simplify this decision:

A fast & lightweight polyfill for min/max-width CSS3 Media Queries (for IE 6-8, and more)

Gizmodo, the popular gadget site and pageview king of Gawker Media, debuted a new look last night that they’re calling HD view, and it’s big. Not big in the grand scheme of things — big in the number of pixels it takes up. Whereas most websites top out at around 1000 pixels in width, Gizmodo HD stretches like Plastic Man, with photos and videos stretching wider and wider as the browser window does too. On my 1900-pixel-wide monitor, pages like this one (photo-dominant) and this one (video-dominant) both resize all the way to blowout width. Call it the doublewide approach.

“I love “content-out” as a strategy…setting a series of breakpoints based on ems (based in turn on font size) could create lovely context-based layouts that move fluidly from one state to another. They won’t match with device sizes but they won’t be trying to. There is a lot to think about and play with there.”

RT @RWD: Digging @tommilway’s “How To Build a Modern Website in 2011”: (via @lukew)

RT @RWD: Fluid grids, meet fluid typography? /via @jonikorpi