Google challenges responsive best practice with Resizer

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Since the advent of responsive web design, entrepreneurs, designers, hobbyists, prototyping startups, and design applications have been releasing tools to allow us to preview our designs at different breakpoints.

The latest to throw their hat into the ring is Google with their new Resizer project, designed to allow designers to preview responsive sites at different breakpoints.

The significance of Google entering the market with a solution is that through its sheer size, Google carries enormous weight within the design community. Whether it’s Google Fonts dominating font serving (a recent WebdesignerDepot poll showed 70% of our readers rely primarily on Google Fonts), or the supplanting of Flat Design by Material Design, anything Google says about web design is frequently taken as ‘best practice’.

So it’s a valid cause for concern when Google advocates an approach that’s contrary to established standards.

Google’s Material Design specification already offers guidance around breakpoints:

For optimal user experience, material design user interfaces should adapt layouts for the following breakpoint widths: 480, 600, 840, 960, 1280, 1440, and 1600dp.

Resizer follows the same principle: it offers laptop and mobile previews at set breakpoints. Laptop (or desktop) screens can be 480px, 600px, 840px, 960px, 1280px, 1440px, or 1600px wide. Mobile screens can be 360px, 600px, 720px, or 1024px wide.

Whilst that is a good cross-section of sizing—although notably doesn’t come close to the full range of Android devices—there is a fundamental error in the approach: Good responsive design uses content breakpoints, not viewport breakpoints; it shouldn’t matter what size Samsung makes its next phone, what matters is at what size your content breaks.

Most site design applications—the latest Adobe Muse for example—correctly allow for custom breakpoints, which ensures that media queries are written for your content, not a hypothetical device.

Resizer is specifically designed to test for (some of) Material Design’s viewport breakpoints. The danger is that Resizer, with Google’s endorsement, will perpetuate the myth of responsive sites as a series of viewport sizes, rather than as fluid device-agnostic content.

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Popular design news of the week: February 22, 2016 – February 28, 2016

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Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers. 

The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.

Mistakes I Made While Learning to Code

 

Ethical Web Development

 

7 Tips for Delighting Users with Great UX

 

How Creativity Can Kill a Good Website Design

 

Why We Don’t Surf the Web Anymore ­And Why that Matters

 

Efficient Responsive Design Process

 

Unsplash 4.0

 

Top Designers Share their Secrets to Beating Creative Block

 

The Two Career Paths for Developers (likely Designers Too)

 

Building a Site Entirely on Github.com

 

Gutenberg: Web Typography for Everyone

 

The Elephant in the Room: Work has Dried Up.

 

Website Design: Instrument

 

Why is the Heart Symbol so Anatomically Incorrect?

 

Unflattening Design

 

Why Minimalist Design Can Benefit your User Experience

 

The Hidden Homescreen

 

The New Web Typography

 

Website Design: Wonderland Industry

 

Mobile Websites: Mobile-Dedicated, Responsive, Adaptive, or Desktop Site?

 

Stripe Atlas a New Way to Start an Internet Business Anywhere.

 

Spotify Moves its Back End to Google Cloud

 

The Met Explains its Controversial New Logo

 

The Next Phase of UX: Designing Chatbot Personalities

 

What Google’s New Layout Means for Search Marketers

 

Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.

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Comics of the week #328

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Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…

Now that you mentioned it…

 

More than enough

 

Occupation hazard

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Mega bundle: 92% off 57 hand-crafted fonts

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When it comes to fonts, you simply can’t have too many. Each typeface comes with its own distinct personality, and each one can be used to highlight different aspects of the business you’re designing for.

If you’re stuck in a Proxima Nova/Open Sans/Helvetica slump, then it’s seriously time to diversify. So we’re delighted that our sister-site, MightyDeals.com, is offering this incredible deal for 57 hand-drawn fonts from Tom Chalky.

Tom’s work is not only professional, refined and skilled, but he can cover a range of styles – classic, whimsical, and more.—Geena Matuson

For just $29—that’s a saving of $350!—you’ll bag 57 handcrafted fonts, plus 230 textures and Photoshop brushes, and on top of that, we’re even throwing in 100s of juicy extras. It’s a mega-bundle that you won’t want to miss.

Largely based on the super-trendy chalk-lettering craze, the typefaces included are packed full of character. Every typeface is multilingual, so unlike many of the free fonts out there, they’re usable on professional sites.

Working as a professional graphic designer, it is a perfect all-round collection of textures, brushes and fonts I need day by day—Suzanne, SL Grafik

Highlights include the Jimmy Script family, featuring light, regular and bold weights; also featuring a complimentary sans-serif that works perfectly with the script.

The Jovial font family is a fun and friendly typeface with 3 weights of serif and 3 weights of sans-serif to choose from. Jovial comes with a ton of bonus design elements all carefully crafted to compliment the letterforms.

If you prefer brush faces to chalk lettering, then you’ll love Petal. Hand-crafted with a brush pen and then digitized, it is full of character and offers the chance to introduce a really personal feel to your designs.

The Rivina Font Collection gives you 9 individually hand-crafted fonts that can be layered to produce stunning graphic effects.

Of course that’s not all, you’ll also get the Avery Sans font-family, the Tallow font family, the Brixton font family, Handly Script, Rock Out Script, Rough Brush Script, Scribbling Tom, the Tall Abbey font family, the Truesketch family and its accompanying ornaments. And then there’s all those incredible textures, from watercolor brushes to print roller textures.

the watercolor brush pack is very high quality, brushes are large and hi-res with a wide variety of textures. His fonts across the board are beautifully done and unique—Robbi, Bobbledy Books

The normal cost of buying this mega-bundle is $379, but for a brief time you can get the entire collection for just $29—an unbelievable 92% discount! If you want the desktop and webfont versions, it’s just $43!

Head over to MightyDeals today to grab this sensational offer while you can.

The Ultimate Guide to Build Modern Flexbox Layouts in CSS – only $14!

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Floating Mac browser Fluid makes its debut

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Billed as “the multitasking browser for everyone,” Fluid is the Mac’s new browser that takes great strides to improve productivity and multitasking on your desktop. Mac users can now enjoy a browser that features picture-in-picture capability, which lets them position the window wherever they choose. Even with the biggest, 27-inch Macs, screen space can still feel limited, making this browser serve a real need.

Apple users will note that using iOS 9 to multitask has never been easier today, thanks to the new picture-in-picture feature on the iPad. This has allowed people to watch Netflix in the foreground while they browse in the background, for instance.

At last, OSX users now have the same opportunity on their desktops. Called a multi-tasker’s dream, Fluid “floats” on top of all of the other windows that you have open during your work flow. Here’s an unexpected-though-remarkable bonus: It also has a transparency feature that, when activated, lets you actually see the content behind Fluid.

Let’s say you want to go to another site when using Fluid. You simply go back to the app via the icon in the dock at the bottom of the screen or the menu bar icon at the top.

Working much the same as browsers you’re already used to operating, Fluid gives you control over your site navigation. You’re able to manipulate the transparency settings, look at your history and favorites, and access file-uploading options. All of these features mean that you can do much of what you can do with standard browsers—including multitasking by watching videos and surfing the web simultaneously.

Images and PDFs are currently browser-supported; in the near future, movie files will be supported, too, allowing users to see them right in the Fluid browser window. MP4 support is right around the corner as well: The developer says MP4 support is in the version that’s still waiting to be approved by the App Store.

With so many users consuming video these days, it’s no surprise that Fluid has taken into consideration Hulu, YouTube, Vimeo and Netflix videos in particular. Users who browse any of these sites will see them automatically transition to embedded video links that enable edge-to-edge viewing.

There’s also Chrome compatibility included in the features. Here is a Chrome extension that lets users open up all Chrome URLs right inside of Fluid. URLs can be anything from videos to basic articles and written content.

(It’s interesting to note that there’s also already another floating Mac browser. It’s called Helium. However, the huge difference between it and Fluid is that Fluid operates more like a conventional browser with ease of access to basic browser controls, which helps the user experience.)

Since the developer behind Fluid is bootstrapping the new browser, it’ll current cost you $2.99.

Here is a very detailed explainer video taking new users through the basic features of Fluid and how to get the most out of it.

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The web reacts to Facebook’s Reactions

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It’s inappropriate to ‘Like’ someone’s firing, breakup, fashion disaster, or untimely demise. That’s the conundrum Facebook has been struggling with since it introduced its ‘Like’ button seven years ago.

Today, after announcing the move last year, Facebook has rolled out its new ‘Reactions’ to all users. The six buttons—Like, Love, Wow, Sad, Bashful, and Sneezy—are intended to convey the full spectrum of human emotion, or at least give users more options to express themselves than they previous had.

Facebook’s ‘Like’ feature has been so fundamental to the definitive social network that it’s part of its branding; as recognizable, if not more so (especially after last year’s rebrand) than the company logotype itself.

It’s a modern-classic problem for a startup that has outgrown its original use-case: the UI that users are accustomed to, no longer reflects the tasks users are trying to accomplish. Twitter faced a similar issue in 2015 when it rebranded its star icon as a heart. It’s a problem LinkedIn would bite your hand off to be troubled by.

In a Medium post on the design process, Product Design Director at Facebook, Geoff Teehan acknowledged the potential teething problems:

We needed to thoughtfully curate any change so it felt like a natural evolution, taking care not to feel abrupt or disrupt everyone on our platform

Strangely, given how important this update is to Facebook, the icons are both visually, and semantically inconsistent: only the ‘Like’ and ‘Love’ buttons are icons, the other four reactions are emoticons; ‘Like’ is a mild version of ‘Love’, but there’s no ‘Mild Distain’ reaction to partner ‘Hate’; ‘Wow’ could be both positive, or negative. Do you send someone ‘Love’ when they’re bereaved?

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