If you haven’t heard much about “Responsive Web Design” yet, you should get reading. The original article was published on A List Apart almost a year ago, and the movement has slowly been building since. Its practically a buzzword now.

The idea is fairly straightforward: With all the new internet devices coming out, people are accessing websites in many different ways and viewing them on many different screen sizes. Monitors are getting bigger, smartphones are (mostly) getting smaller, and tablets are, well, somewhere in the middle. So why develop sites at just one size? If people are viewing sites at different times in different ways, shouldn’t the design—and in some cases the content—change as well?

The idea is a great one. The executions, however, are easy to screw up. Yesterday on Twitter I briefly discussed the blog post More Responsive Design, Please and some of the problems I see with many mobile sites. With Responsive Web Design starting to gain momentum, I fear we will start to see many designers getting caught up in the idea and trying to implement responsive designs just for the sake of it, throwing away many principles that still hold true.

This post is not an attack on Responsive Web Design. I think the idea is great. This post, rather, is to make sure designers are thinking things through before acting. A word of caution, and a reminder of some of the design and development principles that should still hold true regardless of how “responsive” a site is.

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