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Responsive web design and the demise of “pixel perfect”

July 05, 2012 | Hotel Marketing

The web used to be thought of as pages- like book or magazine pages - fixed and immutable. Now, the web is more often thought of as content, actions and transactions, meant to be seen and used in dozens of contexts. Websites are being displayed on devices of every size and shape.

Treating websites as pages like magazine spreads in this multi-device world means that every time the size of the display changes, a new layout must be created if the design is to work in this new size. In extreme cases, that means upwards of a dozen different layouts might need to be created for every page style of a website. The budget and timeline implications of trying to keep up with this layout proliferation are obvious and disastrous.

So we have to do something new.

Increasingly, the web world is turning to responsive design to account for this profusion of screen sizes and viewing contexts. Responsive designs automatically scale or rearrange page elements following a planned set of instructions to better fit displays of different sizes and shapes. Because these alterations are made automatically by the browser, the web page that is a “pixel perfect” match for the comp the designer creates is a thing of the past. Web page layouts become elastic and a traditional comp is at best a snapshot of a single state, a single view of the site on a single monitor, and does not give a true picture of what any given user might see.

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