Frontend · Concept

Responsive design

Designing pages so the same site adapts its layout to any screen, from a small phone to a wide monitor, instead of building separate mobile and desktop versions.

Craft · updated

How it works

Responsive layouts use fluid grids (flexbox and CSS grid), images that scale, and media queries that change the layout at chosen widths called breakpoints. The viewport meta tag tells phones not to zoom out to a desktop-sized page. Mobile-first means writing the small-screen layout first and adding rules as space grows, which keeps the base CSS simple.

Newer tools make it more precise: container queries let a component adapt to the space it sits in rather than to the whole screen, clamp() scales text smoothly, and srcset serves smaller images to smaller screens. Touch targets need to be large enough for fingers. Google indexes the mobile version of pages, so a poor phone layout also hurts SEO.

More in Frontend

Craft

All 26 Frontend terms

Crafted in the dark. Shipped to the world.

Tell us what you are building. You get a private project space with a proposal and a line-by-line quote within a day.