Responsive Gallery – October 2012

From Wichita With Love

From Wichita With Love is the brainchild of a group of friends who happily call the city their home. By distributing special postcards, this project aims to create interest in Wichita as a cultural and commercial destination.

The site was designed by Jonathan Wood, features stylish custom artwork by Roger Strunk and was developed by Rich Bachman, who also devised the responsiveness. Jonathan and I worked closely together during the development of the site and I ran responsive layouts by Jonathan as the build progressed.

The strong visual design is maintained as the layout adapts to narrower screens. The site is a little on the large size, but unfortunately it’s difficult to optimise images pulled in from third-party services like Instagram and Facebook.

Homepage requests/size

114/1.45 MB mobile, 116/1.42 MB desktop

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Jessica Hische

Jessica Hische is a renowned letterer and illustrator based in San Francisco, and this is the second responsive iteration of her site. Much of the redesign had to do with a major IA overhaul, with my portfolio now one consolidated body of work. I tried to approach the site ‘mobile first’ which helped a great deal in reorganising the structure and content.

The site is beautifully typeset, and this provides much of its personality. Overall, the design is subtle and detailed, allowing her portfolio to take centre stage. To show this at its best requires large images and this means an associated download hit, but arguably her work is worth the wait.

Overall, my desire was to simplify. I learn more and more with every responsive site I design, and I think that streamlining my thinking is the biggest positive thing to come with each iteration.

Homepage requests/size

82/2.24 MB mobile, 85/2.52 MB desktop

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Momentum

Momentum is a small studio of designers, developers, photographers and video experts based in Colchester. Their site has an incredibly focused message and design, but we also appreciate the obvious attention paid to delivering a performant experience.

Creative Director, Oliver Bon told us that he wanted a device agnostic site that retained its coherence. I’d seen too many sites where people had only converted pixels to percentages and called it responsive. I didn’t want our site to squeeze itself to fit a screen, I wanted it to make sense.

Oliver discovered that thinking in terms of mobile is a good way to establish hierarchy. I’d spent a long time trying to make navigation work in a narrow window but couldn’t solve the issue. As soon as I experienced the site on my phone, it was obvious. The navigation had to be at the bottom of the website on mobile devices.

Homepage requests/size

20/182 kB mobile, 24/382 kB desktop