Building Responsive Data Visualization for the Web

Chapter 02 Responsive Web Design Tenets

Before breaking out all of our tools, it’s important to set some guiding principles about how to build responsively responsibly. In this chapter, you will examine the foundations of responsive web design, including the guiding principles of your design process—being universal, flexible, economical, and specific. Also covered are seven focal points to build upon as our material becomes more technical.

FYI: This is the content you should casually drop into conversation with someone who can give you a raise.

The Gist

In May of 2010, Ethan Marcotte, a web designer and developer, coined the phrase “Responsive web design.” He did so in the still-accurate and still-important article here: alistapart.com/article/responsive-web-design. Think about that timing for a moment. In the previous chapter, you learned that the iPhone launch drastically shifted the personal computing market in 2007, three years before. And the mobile tipping point, that is, the point at which mobile devices began to outsell traditional computers, happened in 2011, one year later.

What device were you using at this point, and how regularly did you access the web on it? Largely, the mobile web was still a second-class citizen at this point, but that was a paradigm that was rapidly shifting. The timing of Marcotte’s article shows that the importance of a multidevice Internet had already begun to take hold, and users were no longer willing to settle for subpar web ...