I remember my first encounter with responsive design. Before any investigation, it seemed incredibly complex.

The same app runs and behaves differently based on so many types of user devices?

I have to cover all the screen sizes, from ultra-wide monitors, over laptop and tablet devices, all the way to the smartphones?

Mate, that must be a nightmare.

But honestly, it isn’t.

Responsive design is nothing more than a bunch of if statements.

Let’s dive deeper into the topic.

Two Types of Design

Depending on what you create, you have two choices:

Mobile-First Design
Desktop-First Design

Mobile-First Design means that you first design and create software for mobile devices, and then extend it to desktop devices.

It assures that your core functionality will be available on a mobile device.

It’s easy to add more functionality on the bigger screen, but it’s hard to strip away functionality and keeping the core while going to a smaller screen.

According to this research, 68.9% of websites visit came from mobile devices.

If you’re creating a consumer app, Mobile-First Design is likely to be your choice.

Complex B2B solutions require Desktop-First Design, and sometimes don’t even have a fully functioning mobile solution — they’re just too complex.

That’s why I’ll focus on Mobile-First Design in this article.

The Design

We’ll keep this simple. Let’s say that you have a number of items you want to display on your feed. It will look something like this:

We have two components here:

Parent component, container
Child components, items

If we ignore the CSS code for everything except the layout, it will look something like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
</head>
<body>
<div class="container">
<div class="item">Item 1</div>
<div class="item">Item 2</div>
<div class="item">Item 3</div>
</div>
</body>

<style>
.container {
display: grid;
grid-template-columns: 1fr;
align-content: flex-start;
gap: 16px;
padding: 16px;
}

.item {
padding: 88px 16px;
}
</style>
</html>

Can you see the meta tag, <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">?

It’s incredibly important and there’s no responsive design without it. Without it, your browser won’t know the initial zoom and it will look really bad on mobile devices.

Doing the Magic to Make the Desktop Work

Just joking, this is no complex magic. As I’ve said, just a bunch of if statements!

We’re trying to spread the items, keeping 3 of them in each row:

The code looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
</head>
<body>
<div class="container">
<div class="item">Item 1</div>
<div class="item">Item 2</div>
<div class="item">Item 3</div>
</div>
</body>

<style>
.container {
display: grid;
grid-template-columns: 1fr;
align-content: flex-start;
gap: 16px;
padding: 16px;
}

.item {
padding: 88px 16px;
}

@media (min-width: 992px) {
.container {
grid-template-columns: 1fr 1fr 1fr;
}
}
</style>
</html>

Mystical media queries appear!

We’re finally here, introducing @media queries.

Let’s read this in a simple, already familiar way:

if (screen width is bigger or equal than 992px) {
apply styles in the same way as before
}

And that’s it! Nothing more than this! The styles here will affect only screens wider than 992px.

How About Tablet?

You can combine media queries with logical operators.

Yep, you can do something like:

@media (min-width: 768px) and (max-width: 991px) {
// styles
}

And those styles will affect everything in range from 768px to 991px.

Remember, this is nothing more than an if statement.

How to Cover All Devices

Media queries are much more than just min-width and max-width.

You can check stuff like orientation, aspect-ratio, and much more.

You can use logical operators like or, not, and all the others.

But to be honest, what you’ve read in this article is enough for an amazing and simple start.

You probably won’t need most of the other queries anyway. Maybe in some rare scenarios. By then, your knowledge about queries will be so powerful that complex queries will be a joke!

Even though queries are simple, the mindset behind the responsive design is incredibly complex to understand. It can take years for everything to settle down.

That’s why I highly recommend this course: Build Responsive Real-World Websites with HTML and CSS.

You can exchange a small amount of money for incredible wisdom. The field of Software Engineering is massive and there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

Learn from the best.