Responsive Design Talk at Minneapolis Community Technical College (MCTC)

Last night I had the wonderful opportunity to share a powerful technique that I learned from Ethan Marcotte on creating a responsive, flexible website with students and attendees of the Meetup Group. My talk, which took about an hour and a half, was made even more interesting and engaging by fielding some very challenging and meaningful questions from the audience.

Since it was my first attempt at speaking to a large crowd, I was admittedly nervous for the first 10 minutes. However, I settled into the discussion by introducing myself and speaking a bit about my history and what I do before getting into the meat of my presentation. I first talked about the benefits of a flexible grid, flexible images, and how to use media queries to target different resolutions (devices). Before diving into creating a website, I shared some data to illustrate how the mobile territory is growing much more rapidly than expected.

Before closing my presentation, I gave my perspective on different responsive tools and frameworks available for designers/developers, and advised to use them only when it’s crucial for a project. I’m concerned that these elements are being promoted as something we must use for every project, while in reality they can often increase the complexity to a project. This type of unnecessary complexity leads to significant financial issues and causes major frustration throughout the development of a project.

Finally, I wanted to thank the students and organizers of the Minnesota Web Design Meetup group, Bill Hendricks, Faculty Coordinator of Minneapolis Community and Technical College and Ketan Kakkad, a successful entrepreneur in Minnesota, for giving me the opportunity to share and learn from a very smart audience.

For those of you who were unable to attend the discussion, here’s my deck for your review. Enjoy, and let me know if you have any questions!