Helpful tools for Responsive Web Designs

With the growth of mobile web use and more and more innovative mobile devices being developed every day means web designers and developers need to get clever. Responsive web design should be at the heart of all new website developments.

All web design agency staff and design professionals need to be approaching their work from the responsive angle and provide users with an end-product which meets all their needs. Creating a responsive web site for the first time can be difficult but there are a huge range of tools to support your work.

Layout and Wireframes

The beginning of producing a quality responsive website is to draft out your plan and produce a blueprint so that all the elements of the page are roughly in place. These tools are designed for that purpose and give you time to analyse your choices.

Responsive Wireframes
Responsive wireframes was designed and developed by Adobe’s James Mellers and it offers a variety of common wireframes mock up templates for mobile and desktop designs. The range includes homepage templates and gives you a basic guide for learning how responsive design elements can be stacked and how you can determine which areas of the layout need the most emphasis depending on the devices in question.

Multi-Device Layout Patterns
This tool offers a range of different design and layout templates categorised into five main types of layout. The designer’s website shows each of these different types and the ways in which they can be used effectively in the development of a responsive website. It’s a great option if you’re developing a responsive layout for a brand that already has an existing website.

CSS and Fluid Grids

Browsing and analysing different types of layout is just the start. These tools are more in depth and technical and provide responsive grids depending on your customised inputs.

Bootstrap
Designed by Twitter, Bootstrap focuses on making prototyping easy. With its innovative ‘Customize’ feature users can select responsive elements to make up their page and then download the finished version complete with jQuery plugins, minified CSS and other necessary elements to make your work simpler.

Adobe Edge Reflow
The new version of Adobe Edge Reflow is coming soon and due to its likeness to Photoshop it’s bound to be favoured by web designers. Edge Reflow has been developed solely to handle responsive layouts and includes grid systems  and advanced CSS layouts.

Responsive Graphics

As well as layouts being responsive, graphics also need to comply. These cleverly programmed tools can help you out in this area.

Adaptive Images
Adaptive Images has been developed to innovatively read a user’s screen size and automatically rescale its embedded HTML images to ensure optimum viewing. It requires no mark-up and can be set simply in three steps using Apache, PHP 5.x or GD lib.

Retina Images
Retina Images are extremely user friendly and display hi-res images in a different way on devices that support them. It downloads one image at a time ensuring load time isn’t excessive. As long as your images have height and width attributes there will be no need to change them either.

Tools such as FitText and FitVids also exist to ensure both fonts and videos are responsive too.

Testing

Testing your design is essential and this is where The Responsinator comes in. This tool will show you how your page loads on a range of mobile devices so you can ensure it looks as it should in all instances.

We’ve given you just a small sample of some of the most effective, responsive design tools that any web design agency can benefit from.