Responsive web design turns fifteen.

Hey, here’s a thing that’s fun to say:

Happy fifteenth birthday, responsive web design!

Well, fun and weird. You know how it goes.

But yes, it’s true: the original “Responsive Web Design” article was published fifteen years ago. Fifteen whole entire years. As the kids say: dang.¹

I did a little retrospective when the article turned ten, so I don’t think I need to do another one. I’ll just say again that I coined the phrase “responsive design” well over a month before the article was published, at a conference in early April of that year. Thankfully Mandy Brown, then an editor at A List Apart, heard the talk, and told me it really needed to be an article. Everything sort of followed on from that.

And frankly, I am still surprised by what exactly followed on from that. Ever since the article came out, I tell folks that all I did was meet a publishing deadline; responsive design only became a thing because of the people who got excited about the concept, experimented with it, wrote about it, and moved the idea forward. People like you.

Fifteen years on, it feels like responsive design’s become something truly mundane — something that’s just kind of expected. Is there still work to do? Sure. Absolutely. Urgently, even. But the idea of designing sites that work across mobile, desktop, and whatever else is just kind of seen as the thing you’re supposed to do. And to be clear, that’s not a vindication of any ideas I might have had fifteen years ago. Rather, it’s a testament to just how compelling the Web’s own flexibility is. We’ve stopped designing against a truly fluid design medium, and now we see it as an asset — something we can design both with and for. And I don’t know about you, but I think that’s pretty neat.

This has been “Responsive web design turns fifteen.” a post from Ethan’s journal.

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