Intro to Adaptive Web Design

This deck was delivered at Chadev on

For years, designers and developers have griped about the difficulties they encountered in supporting the numerous desktop browsers out there, but mobile is even more fragmented. Phones, tablets, media players, video game systems—each device (and in some cases each browser on each device) has its own dimensions, quirks and capabilities. It can make your brain hurt just thinking about it.

Thankfully, going mobile doesn’t have to be a painful experience. In this session, I introduce you to the concept of progressive enhancement and demonstrate why it is the way forward for web design, especially on mobile devices. In the course of this talk, I’ll walk you through progressive enhancement’s layered approach and show you how the latest techniques—mobile first, responsive design, and adaptive UI—fit in to the process.