Beyond Squishy: The Principles of Adaptive Design

I had a fantastic time traveling down to Austin and speaking about responsive web design at SXSWi. It was my first time at the behemoth festival and I can say it was quite the overwhelming experience (in a good way). I was slotted to speak at the same time as Al Gore, so the fact that anyone showed up to my talk is really beyond me.

Here’s the session description:

Responsive web design has hit the scene like a bomb, and now designers everywhere are showing off to their bosses and peers by resizing their browser windows. “Look! The site is squishy!”

While creating flexible layouts is important, there’s a whole lot more that goes into truly exceptional adaptive web experiences. This session will introduce the Principles of Adaptive Design: ubiquity, flexibility, performance, enhancement and future-friendliness. We need go beyond media queries in order to preserve the web’s ubiquity and move it in a future-friendly direction.

I had an absolute blast in Austin and was so happy to talk to so many people thinking about and doing great things to make the Web better on this whole slew of connected experiences. SXSW was yet another reminder that we’re working in an amazing time in an amazing medium. Even though it’s insanely hard at times, it’s inspiring to see so much progress being made. I’m honored to be a part of it.

You can check out the audio and slides from the talk. Enjoy!