UIEtips: Designing for Breakpoints

In today’s UIEtips, we offer an article printed earlier this year on A List Apart – Designing for Breakpoints by Stephen Hay (reprinted with the permission of A List Apart, the author, and the publisher). It’s an excerpt from Chapter 7 of his book, Responsive Design Workflow, available from New Riders.

If your team struggles with how to design responsively, then you’ll want to hear Stephen’s practical approach to improving your responsive web design workflow during his December 12 virtual seminar on Responsive Web Design Workflows.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

When thinking about major breakpoints, remember to think about device classes. If you’re thinking about smartphones, tablets, laptops/desktops, TVs, and game consoles, for example, you’re heading in the right direction. If you’re thinking in terms of brand names and specific operating systems, you’re on the wrong track. The idea is to think in terms of general device classifications and, sometimes, device capabilities. Capabilities are more important when designing web applications, since you should be thinking about what screens will look like both with and without any particular capability.

Read the article Designing for Breakpoints.

What are your strategies for designing breakpoints? Tell us about it below.