Divya Manian, "The State of Affairs with Web Design"

Web Design today is just a recurring chant of ‘Responsive Web Design’ But how did we get here?
To do this, we need to take a dive into history to recognize how the context for responsive web design evolved. Web design is a fairly new industry, and yet there are already strict rules on what should or shouldn’t be on the web. “You shouldn’t use tables”, “You shouldn’t use fixed width units”, “You cannot design for one size!” are all slogans that we chant merrily without quite understanding the impact of each or even why we came to some of these conclusions. In this talk we will look at that history of such superstitions and investigate what new superstitions we are forming with regards to responsive design.
The evolution of web design goes hand in hand with the evolution of the browsers and more importantly the tools that are available - not just for development but also for design. In this session, we will look at how the evolution of browsers, devices and tooling have a symbiotic relationship with each other.
We will look at how varied the demographic of users of tools & browsers is, and the kind of difficult questions that tools and browsers face as they try to get the users to keep pace with new technologies through the example of the evolution of new tools at Adobe and Adobe’s contributions to web standards.
We will also look at the evolution of design itself from a pixel-perfect comp rendering to atomic design and how that is a result of the evolution of web design but also contributes to new developments in web design world.
Finally we will look at the common workable patterns in creating responsive websites and how responsive websites are requiring significant changes in how the process of creating websites and a look at some of the processes that work.

[@RJOVenturesInc]

Great post WebVisions. Kudos to Divya Manian for the insight on Responsive Web Design!
Richard John
RJO Ventures, Inc.