Responsive Design
What is Responsive design? Simply defined, is an approach during which a designer intends to provide an optimal viewing experience — easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones). A similar definition offers that it’s the marriage of content with the context in which said content is being viewed.
This really is new technology...
The phrase “responsive design” was only coined in 2010 and in 2012 this new technology was named as the #2 Top Design Trend by .net Magazine. Now it is considered the top design thinking for 2013.
Responsive design isn’t a fad, probably...
It’s always difficult to know what trends will stay and what trends will fade, but unlike many things that have happened on the Internet, responsive design isn’t a solution looking for a problem. Everyone who’s ever had an unfulfilling experience on their mobile or tablet device is a living depiction of the problem and every company that has shelled out too much money for multiple website designs is an example of a financial model that isn’t sustainable.
The implications for digital editions are even greater...
For starters, most digital editions consist of portrait styled pages that are placed onto landscape oriented screens. This results in obvious wasted space. Moreover, digital edition text is not web text. Therefore, it’s rooted to the page it was originally placed upon. The result? In all but the largest monitors, zooming is required for many digital editions. If responsive design is good for websites, it’s pretty amazing for digital editions.
It's somewhat future-proof...
Responsive design is all about what size the screen is that will be reading the content. Whether the screen is large or small, what’s returned is designed in such a way to be legible without zooming. That’s a concept that will resonate with readers whether screens become larger, smaller or (and this is mostly likely) both.
Analytics with responsive design are different..
Because text is rooted to a given page with traditional design, a “page view” is always a page view. But with responsive design, a single-page article on a desktop computer could easily be five pages on a mobile device. For that reason, responsive design downplays (or entirely ignores) page views in favor of engagement time, article views and other metrics.
It's not a pixel-perfect medium...
With print and to a lesser degree, traditional websites, a designer can be assured that the reader will view content exactly on the page where they were intended to, respective to the other elements. But with responsive design, the emphasis is always on minimizing the amount of zooming and scrolling for the reader. When that becomes the dominant effort, style is forced to take a bit of a back seat. Rules can help minimize many undesirable results, but there’s no denying that not all pages will look perfect on all devices.
Source: http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/NXTbook/responsivedesign/index.php?startid=5#/4