Taking RWD To The Extreme — Smashing Magazine
February 10, 2025
Tomasz Jakut reflects on the evolution of web design, recalling the days when table layouts were all the rage and Flash games were shaping the online culture. And then responsive web design (RWD) happened — and it often feels like the end of history; well, at least for web design. After all, we still create responsive websites, and that’s The True Way™ of doing layouts on the web. Yet the current year, 2025, marks the 15th anniversary of Ethan Marcotte’s article, which forever changed web development. That’s a whole era in “web” years. So, maybe something happened after RWD, but it was so obvious that it went nearly invisible. Let’s try to uncover this something.
What is it to design for the web?
This is a question designers and developers have been grappling with for decades.
25 yers after my A Dao of Web Design, 15 years after Ethan Marcotte’s Responsive Web Design, through Jen Simmons Intrinsic Web Design, Heydon Pickering’s Algorithmic Design and Jeremy Keith’s declarative design, we seem to have come so far and yet still often seem rooted in the paradigm of print design.
In this fantastic article Tomasz Jakut follows the story of web design, and explores what is might be today and in the future.
