Ethan Marcotte didn’t invent responsive web design. He did something much more important: he named it. He observed what was, at the time, a sprawling set of nascent tactics and identified among them an underlying strategy which, once named, became not just a way of doing web design, but the way of doing it. In the intervening years, the phrase "responsive web design" has become one of the few entries in the industry lexicon to find widespread adoption beyond the field, demonstrating not only the soundness of the methods but also the clarity and persuasiveness of the phrase. I was speaking to a carpenter recently when he confessed — unbidden — that it was important to him that his website be responsive.
That’s the power of a great name.
Here Marcotte turns to words again, but this time to slay one: the page is dead. It was terminal the moment the first website came online, of course, but it’s been a long, slow decline, marked by many moments in which it seemed to have rallied. As recently as five years ago, when Responsive Web Design was first published, designing web "pages" was understood to be core to the job. Since then, a deceptively subtle transformation has occurred: we’ve abandoned pages for modular components, ditching that dusty metaphor from print days for an organizational system much more attuned to the shifty world of the screen. Like those before, this transformation requires that we evolve both our technical approach and our mental model for designing experiences on the web — that is, both the code and the language we use to talk about it.
Marcotte has you covered on both fronts. As with Responsive Web Design, this book describes a series of smart and efficient technical strategies that you can put to work right away. (And you’d best do so quickly.) But it also suggests a compelling conceptual framework for thinking about a more modular web, leaving the page behind for good. With millions of devices and an impossible number of screens, it’s about time.
— Mandy Brown