Responsive enough

Textile 2024 week 16 note

We’re in the midst of designing and prototyping a number of sites, showing what we’re working on at Textile, which I’ve been writing about or around in the past couple of weeks or so. At first we talked about just putting a website up in Framer which should be good enough for now. Then I realised that you don’t quite get responsive behaviour out of the box.

The long standing issue with designing visuals, and well most things with screens, is that you sort of only half know what it will look like for the person that might stumble upon it. Color issues notwithstanding, there is no way to know on what sort of device or screen size someone is going to be using. So just thinking about 65.49% of global website traffic being on mobile devices makes us think this is something we need to get underway. It just needs to work at this point, but fortunately at this point responsive design is quite established. Framer itself has some tools to help with this, but the interesting thing from a design standpoint is how to let the design degrade and how to decide what to cut. What is important to see or read when you’re on a phone? Just how much stuff should we be putting on a page at this point then? The issues are innumerable but part of the process of being loose in the right places with how to design for what is a constantly shifting target.