Adaptive Layouts

Suffice to say, adaptive layouts are a very exciting development and have fast become a major consideration for our team. They are not new as a theory but have certainly been recently fine tuned and come into their own after the launch of a fantastic book by Ethan Marcotte called 'Responsive Web Design'.

The idea is for smoother user engagement with a website design when accessing it via the multitude of mobile and tablet devices now on the market. Essentially we work through each page template to consider how the core design template would then fluidly adapt, whilst still retaining the information priority and core structure. Drop down menus may change to mobile friendly menu items, images shrink or expand, carousels turn into single image slideshows, horizontal layouts become vertical for easy touch screen finger scrolling etc. etc.

Some say adaptive layouts can be boring and restrict the design process because they are sticking too strictly to measured column views but we have found the exact opposite, where having to consider how a site will adapt for mobile devices is a fascinating new challenge.

We are close to completion of two new sites using these techniques, the first is a 2012 Olympics Photographic Competition website for The Royal Photographic Society and the other is a new website for Active Centres formally South Gloucestershire Leisure Centres. Both will be launched over the coming months.

Some other examples of responsive web design can be found here: mediaqueri.es, foodsense.is