thank you for reading
Starting as an artist, identifying what makes things "look good" is important for gaining acceptance in your work. Many years of experience has given me the understanding of what makes a design grid so helpful for folks who layout elements on a page in an eye-catching or aesthetical-pleasing way. In my transition from physical mediums to digital, this same approach came along for the ride. That is, until responsive design.
Responsive design completely changed the way we thought of a page on the web. It was now dynamic and challenging. For people like me who were exploring what this meant for designing in the browser; this was an exciting time. However, for folks who haven't yet traveled into the realm of code, they were seemingly left in their old design applications. Those applications still haven't progressed much.
I think this is why digital designers still expect to use the grid while experienced layout engineers have moved beyond it. If designers had design applications and tools that were able to truly support responsive design without code, it would be much closer to how the web works for our users.
I hope this thesis and related examples cause another paradigm shift for designers to rely less on strict columns and consider these techniques for unpredictable content and uncertain dimensions.
