Review of Responsive Design: Patterns & Principles

It’s been awhile since I’ve read a technical book but I felt I had to make an exception for Ethan Marcotte, who recently released Responsive Design: Patterns & Principles.

Marcotte is, of course, most well known for his prior book, Responsive Web Design, which helped bring the concepts of media query oriented fluid design to the forefront of our industry.

This recent A Book Apart is a great extension on that, diving into four specific components of site design: navigation; images and videos; advertising; and the grid.

Each topic is delved into with an appropriate amount of depth with enough humour to make a possibly dry subject entertaining.

Throughout the book, Marcotte remarks on the shift from designing pages to designing systems and uses the four components along with plenty of industry examples to demonstrate how to possibly handle this shift in your projects.

My only complaint is that Marcotte may not have gone far enough in tackling how to handle going responsive with complex systems. Maybe a third book should be written! (Ethan, hint hint.)