Ethan Marcotte
Ethan is a web designer who is passionate about beautiful design, elegant code, and the intersection of the two. Besides being the man who established popular concepts and approaches such as fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries, Ethan coined the term “Responsive Web Design”, which has become a widely adopted new way of thinking about designing for the ever-changing Web. Ethan has even written a book on the subject, published by A Book Apart. A popular and experienced speaker, Ethan is also the coauthor of Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing With Web Standards (3rd Edition), and a contributing writer to Dan Cederholm’s Handcrafted CSS. Over the years Ethan’s clientele has included the likes of Sundance Film Festival, Stanford University, New York Magazine, The Today Show and The Boston Globe.
Ethan lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has a blog, where he expresses his passion for robots, and tweets @beep.
More thoughts by Ethan Marcotte:
-
Of all the things I’ve learned this year—and believe me, there’ve been a lot—I realize what an asset it was to have a wide array of mobile devices nearby as I worked, especially for a large-scale responsive site. As we design further and further beyond the desktop, device access is going to become a real challenge for our industry to overcome. Nothing shapes your design decisions like holding a device in your hand, and interacting with it just as your users might.
-
It only took a decade or so of my colleagues telling me to do so, but I’ve finally gotten into the habit of keeping a sketchbook with me at all times. I drew all the damned time as a boy, but as an adult I think I got a little intimidated by pencil and paper. But being able to quickly sketch out an layout or scribble down an idea is so, well, liberating.
-
I’m a few thousand feet in the air as I write this, trapped in the center seat on an evening flight home. The plane is dark, but I’m surrounded by illuminated faces, each lit up as the passengers around me work or play on a laptop, tablet, or phone. After an hour or two, I realize just how, well, varied the devices are.
The diversity almost comes off as a bit contrived: I turn my head and count a couple Nokia smartphones, more than a few iOS devices, a Windows netbook, and a couple Mac laptops. I get up to fetch some water, and on the way back to my seat I notice a child guiding furious birds across the screen of his iPad; on the opposite aisle seat, a man swipes through his vacation photos on a PlayBook, while his wife drafts an email on an Android phone.
I couldn’t have dreamed of this Web when I started my career, but it’s the Web I want to build for. We all hold the promise of access in our hands, these miraculous little devices ensuring the content we want is nearby. And the means of accessing that content is almost secondary to my fellow passengers: these glowing faces work in clients both web-based and native, browsing sites both device-specific and responsive. A thousand flowers have bloomed, and we can pick the ones that best suit our work.
-
Focus is a fleeting thing, and I wonder if I’ve already let mine slip away. In the time it took me to write that first sentence, I switched over to my browser to research something, and then popped over to Twitter, then fired up my RSS feeds. It’s possible I never had much of an attention span to begin with, but lately—more than I used to, certainly—I find myself missing life before wifi, before broadband, before browser tabs.
And then I wonder: is this a design problem? I find myself spending more and more time working through my reading backlog via apps like Readability and Readmill, and I dream of a web that rewards focus—one that lengthens my attention span, rather than simply competing for it.
Maybe it’s just me. But I do wonder if, instead of focusing on those three second rules, can we design something, y’know, slower?
…BRB twitter.
-
I’ve written about this before, but I pace like crazy when I’m on the phone. I don’t know what it is, but I think my body has to wander a bit so that my mind doesn’t. So to stay focused, I walk little loops around the living room; I trace figure eights around my kitchen; I walk up and down the front hallway.
This is, I’ve realized, kind of the inverse of what I do most of the day: sitting mostly immobile, staring at glowing glass panes of various shapes and sizes, my mind racing up and down and through Photoshop, CSS issues, todo items, and inboxes, running without moving until the evening, when rest comes.
Walking while thinking; mind racing while sitting. I need a middle ground: more walks without phones, more focus in front of my computer.
Here are the dates of Ethan Marcotte's future thoughts:
- Sunday, 3 June
- Sunday, 8 July
- Wednesday, 1 August
- Sunday, 2 September
- Saturday, 13 October
- Monday, 5 November
- Saturday, 1 December