Two (similar) patterns for responsive navigation that don’t involve sweeping everything behind a hamburger icon.
When I’ve experimented with auto-overflowing horizontal patterns like this, I’ve found that a judiciously-placed box shadow can give a nice affordance.
And by LLMS I mean: (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(S).
I really like this approach: using separate pages instead of in-page interactions. I remember Simon talking about how great this works, and that was a few years back, before we had view transitions.
I build separate, small HTML pages for each “interaction” I want, then I let CSS transitions take over and I get something that feels better than its JS counterpart for way less work.
What’s important is that you test it with real users… and stop using hover menus.
Strong agree!
Making the case for moving your navigation to the bottom of the screen on mobile:
Phones are getting bigger, and some parts of the screen are easier to interact with than others. Having the hamburger menu at the top provides too big of an interaction cost, and we have a large number of amazing mobile app designs that utilize the bottom part of the screen. Maybe it’s time for the web design world to start using these ideas on websites as well?
These are good challenges to think about. Almost all of them are user-focused, and there’s a refreshing focus away from reaching for a library:
It’s tempting to read about these problems with a particular view library or a data fetching library in mind as a solution. But I encourage you to pretend that these libraries don’t exist, and read again from that perspective. How would you approach solving these issues?
One way of implementing the growing/shrinking navigation pattern—an alternative to just shoving everything behind a hamburger icon.
Applying progressive enhancement to responsive navigation patterns.
Going from delight to default in one straight line.
The joy of getting hands-on with HTML and CSS.
How Clearleft worked with the Chrome team to create a fifteen-part course on modern responsive design.
Five more articles on modern responsive design to close out the course.