Devices all the way up: Notes on responsive design

It’s not often that I raise my head above the parapet to pontificate on things. Last night was an exception, as a while ago I’d decided to accept Chris Collingridge’s invitation to speak at one of the regular NUX Manchester meet ups.

The last time I’d done a talk in front of an audience of that size was my brothers wedding, where 275 friendly, engaged and empathetic souls listened to me for all of five minutes. The time slot for last night was a lot longer – up to an hour – but thankfully the audience was of similar character, listening to me bang on about my experiences of responsive web design for around 50 minutes.

A wide variety of disciplines were present in the audience, from UX/UI, to devs, content, and even some product people, with a fair few having worked on responsive projects before. It also meant there were some knowing laughs, especially when we got to some of the things I had to say about HTML prototypes.

I had a great time giving it (less so immediately before hand with a last gasp rush of nerves) and I hope that the people who attended got something out of it too. Also, many thanks to NUX for having me and to the guys from Rentalcars.com for hosting it. That office space they have there is pretty amazing – they’re hiring UX designers for anyone interested in working in it.

The slides are now up on SpeakerDeck and embedded below. I also put together a Storify of tweets during and after the talk for more context.