Notes on engineering and life.

Mobile Last

30 Dec 2012

Ben Howdle

Ben Howdle

Product engineer helping early-stage teams move intentionally but quickly.

"Mobile Last" - is this guy trolling??

Maybe. Maybe not.

It's a slight tongue in cheek dig at our community; what usually happens: Industry Big Wig says 'Mobile First (or similar) is the new way we do things', then everyone thinks 'right, we must now do Mobile First', then we start telling clients we are now a 'Mobile First' agency or designer, clients then think they must go with someone who implements 'Mobile First'.

I don't know about you, but I get very nervy when we start "unofficially" labelling approaches. "Mobile First", "Responsive Web Design", "Adaptive Web Design" and "Future Friendly". Haven't got a problem with these actual approaches, it's just the furore that surrounds the use of them. Conversations on Twitter usually go like "You're using LESS, I hate you", "Well, you're using Sass, you're a douche". Please. Who cares?

The client? No. Your users? No. You and your team? Yep, these are the only people that is affects.

With my latest site redesign and domain name change, I actually did employ a "Mobile Last" approach. I designed the site, did the markup, wrote the templating stuff, did the CSS for desktop, THEN, did the styles for tablet and mobile with a few lines of CSS. Hey, I know it's no Square or Karma, but it works for me and works for the content I have on my site.

Most of this article was venting the frustration of our community jumping on trends and partly because I wanted to write a post in iA Writer and save it to Dropbox then compile it with Jekyll.

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