Scaling vs. fluid vs. responsive
There is a lot of confusion over these terms and designers often incorrectly use them interchangeably. In truth, each of these are distinct evolutionary steps in layout technique that have emerged over time in line with advances in technology. Scaling layouts are designed to scale every element relative to every other element. They are responsive in the sense that they will scale the content dynamically in response to changes in the size of the viewport. The layout itself remains static, changing the size of every element to maintain a consistent appearance.


Disaster 1) Wrapping menus
If you use a navbar at the top of your page, a responsive design is supposed to “snap” it to a more compact format when the page is displayed on a small screen. But this does not always work perfectly if the display area is wider than the break point, but too small to display all the menu items in a single line. The result is a menu that wraps.
Disaster 2) Using fixed width images
Content areas are usually set to a size relative to the viewport. So when a fixed-width image is wider than the size of the area, image cropping occurs.

Disaster 3) Element distortion
This one is a bit more obscure, but essentially what happens when your layout is displayed on a small viewport is that any unhandled columns behave like rows. This is a problem because the distortion of the content unintentionally changes the hierarchy of your design.
Planning helps avoid mistakes
This article has discussed only the 3 most commonly encountered responsive design disasters, but there are plenty of other ways for a good design to go wrong. Preventing errors is not too difficult. Modern browsers have built-in responsive layout testing, so plan your design well and test often.Emma Grant
Emma Grant is a professional freelance content writer from Ireland. Over the past three years she has travelled the world while running her business from her laptop. You find her at www.florencewritinggale.com
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