Responsive Web Design (RWD) while an easy to grasp a concept for most webmasters and devs today, still requires a concise understanding of the core functions that browsers use to render the responsive design for display, and ignoring those functions can lead to the development of badly coded responsive websites that will hinder user experience, and cause issues with website performance. Besides HTML5 which has helped to define the direction of responsive web design, developers also need a great understanding of CSS3 without which responsive design is simply impossible to accomplish. Media queries for example is the standalone solution for defining particular pieces of content for particular device screen sizes and types. But even then, that kind of functions touch only the very tip of the iceberg of everything that responsive design is capable of.

Mobile-friendly is another sensitive topic that will reconstruct and reorganize how responsive design is perceived. There’s clear indication that mobile itself is moving towards a more specific approach of displaying content, which comes in the form of mobile applications and frameworks. All these growth concepts require a thorough investigation of the future of design, and how your current tactics can be modified for future growth.

With the understanding of where web design is headed, we’ve compiled a list of some truly practical and handy responsive web design tools that will fit just great into your existing toolkit, surely some of these will have already found their way to your heart, but some might be completely new to you. From direct front-end frameworks to mobile testing tools, and plenty of inspirational design pattern resources will help you build better, more responsive, and more engaging websites from now on — grab a cup of tea and begin your excursion down this stellar roundup.

Best Responsive Web Design Tools

Squarespace

Most beautiful responsive website design tool

Wix

Most popular site-building tool with millions of users.

Wix is the most popular responsive website building tool with millions of websites worldwide. Its success comes from great functionality, design and very aggressive marketing practices. Wix has hundreds of amazing website templates you can use as a base for your website or start with a blank canvas, whatever you prefer.

Zyro

Best website building tool for beginners building their first website.

Zyro is an up-and-coming responsive site builder by Hostinger. It is a brand new tool but has shown that it can compete against Wix and Squarespace. It features a sleek design and thousands of templates you can use to crate the website of your dreams.

Bootstrap

Most popular frontend framework made for experienced developers.

Starting out with front-end website building has never been more convenient. Frameworks like Bootstrap make the process of bootstrapping a functional business website truly an effortless task. And since Bootstrap follows the latest web standards, all features are also compatible with responsive design. What makes Bootstrap so successful is highly attributed to its vast collection of components, take the standard Bootstrap grid design and apply to it any of the free components to quickly bootstrap a modern website.

Components such as buttons that can be customized in shapes, colors and sizes, and navigation bars that you can yourself modify to integrate with custom JavaScript features. Browsers have also leaped very far into the future to support responsive design, for example — embedding videos or images can be configured to automatically resize in accordance to the device size that your visitors are accessing from. This makes the user experience modern, smooth, and reliable. In the big picture, Bootstrap is the framework that will help you create a website, then you can move forward with many of the other responsive design tools we will mention to further extend the experience.

Webflow

Flexbox is perhaps the most talked-about feature of modern web design and development, and has spurred countless topics written by veteran developers in the last year alone. Flexbox’s basic definition is a robust layout tool that solves common issues in responsive web design. What’s Webflow? It’s a platform that integrates Flexbox design into a visual builder, save hours of development and opt for an easy UI that you can build responsive layouts with.

So anyway.. Why Flexbox? Part of the reason why Flexbox is so popular, is that it solves complex design issues that would otherwise require unproductive design patterns. To give you the basic rundown of Flexbox — you can effectively create complex design patterns with only a few lines of code. For example, creating equally aligned modal elements that continue to remain aligned despite the font sizes that you use for headlines, or sub-headlines. With Flexbox you can create layouts like feature outlines, or customer reviews and align them to provide a remarkable user experience. Even mundane things like pricing tables that you relied on native CSS3 to help you outline, can now be integrated in your designs using Webflow’s Flexbox features. Full-on website grids can be built to accelerate the speed at which a website comes into fruition.

UIPatterns

As a web designer, there’s no escaping the UI patterns that govern so many of the websites, apps, and tools that we use on daily basis. Imagine what the digital world would look like if we didn’t rely on common UI patterns. It would be one crazy, distorted world. But, thanks to evolution of design, and the understanding of how patterns repeat themselves in common functionality, it’s possible to learn about the different UI patterns that rule categories like forms, data management, content management, layout, navigation, and user screen pages.

A vast array of design screens can be recreated using your own design style, but following the guidance of common UI patterns to achieve a sense of balance. And those are also the categories that UI Patterns covers. Each category has several sample patterns that display how each design category can be modified to reflect standard UI patterns, all of whom are most favorable by the average digital user. The design patterns you’ll find on this page can be applied to native, and mobile applications. Responsive design was all about usability right from the start, managing a single layout for multiple devices is a heavy task on its own, but patterns help to even out the problematic tasks by letting you apply a single pattern to multiple designs.

Imagify

Images is another highly favorable topic in responsive design. After all, you wouldn’t want to be serving the same exact image to visitors who comes from tablet devices, or from their smartphones. The device resolution will always be different. While CSS3 features maintain some sort of balance between the image sizes and types that different devices are downloading, improving image quality and their size is still a very strong topic. Sure, HTTP/2 will bring forth some great changes for developers worldwide, but the next 5 years will still be fairly tough for the web.

HTTP Archive reports that in 2010 — on average, the size of a single web page was roughly 700kb, whereas in 2016 — that number has grown to 2.2mb! And majority of those megabytes is taken up by visual content; images. So.. you have to ask yourself, am I compromising the performance of my pages due to irresponsible decisions in terms of image optimization? That’s where you can learn about Imagify, a service/platform that sort of wants to answer that question for you, and give you the right tools to get on with image optimization, as a fully automated process.

A WordPress plugin is made available so that you can optimize all your existing and future uploads on the fly. Unless you directly look into the problem, it can often seem like it’s not a problem at all, but if corporations like Google encourage users to improve their website performance in exchange for better rankings.. you know that there’s no going back from that.

JsTips

JavaScript is frequently being used in front-end development. Think of frameworks like React, Angular, Meteor, Node.js, and native JavaScript libraries that plug together the rest of the web. jQuery is the library you’ll use fairly frequently if you’re all about fancy responsive design features, and the only way to get better at JS is by writing more code. In this case, tips can be awfully helpful to learn new things, to understand patterns better, and to generally keep your brain fresh and afloat with the latest happenings in JavaScript. So.. install JsTips on your smartphone.

A simple and elegant application that will deliver you a new JavaScript tip on daily basis. Sometimes, the tips will talk about stuff that you already know at the back of your mind, but more often than not — you’ll run into stuff that’s creative, futuristic, and plain exciting to try and work with. The one review on the App Store suggests that the app is lacking some basic design functionality, but as a coder — you get what you crave the most, the meaty bits of code examples and code definition so that you can jump on that code editor and plug away.

The Data Visualisation Catalogue

The thing with responsive design is, you can work all day and night on perfecting the layout you’re after, but even after the layout is done — there’s more work to be done, and that usually comes down to the way that you can integrate interactive and dynamic content into your designs. Sure, WordPress made it easy to plug-up the content with exciting plugins that somewhat cater to the responsive device, but truly native responsive websites are a much tougher cookie to crack, and one of the things you find in content the most is charts, graphs, and other data visualizations that depict the story through numbers. New York Times is a great example of how a responsive websites will need a responsive set of tools to create dynamic visualizations for the latest election results.

That’s why we’re sharing more about The Data Visualization Catalogue — a wonderful collection of data visualization patterns and functions that each have a unique page, a unique description, a preview of what the chart/graph/visualization is going to look like, and most importantly — a recommendation of the most stable latest tools that can be used to recreate such a diagram, or visualization. A lot of work has gone into this project, and it would be a fairly ignorant idea to avoid using this to help yourself understand responsive data visualization better. There is a great deal of examples available, such as — arc diagrams, area graphs, bar charts, brainstorm clouds, bubble charts and maps, bulletin graphs, calendars, connection maps, flow maps, histograms, line graphs, spiral plots and countless other creative ways to display your data, on a responsive website.

Responsive web design tools for front-end developers

How was that for a good refresh of memory and understanding? We covered some really jaw-dropping tools, yet the market for responsive design tools is growing with time. Sometimes it’s not just about the tools that gives us direct code tips, or a framework to work with. The tools inspire us to make our apps and website more responsive where design is truly concerned.

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