Party Like It's 1997 (Or How to Retrofit Responsive)

While designing and building Mobile First is always ideal, many projects don't have the ability do a ground-up build of their product. Sometimes, the reality of the situation is that you simply need to retrofit responsive onto an existing desktop-only site. How can we accomplish this? Can we even get results that are similar to truly building mobile first? What does Party Like It's 1997 mean? Come and find out!

Our Speakers

We are going to have two great speakers, with a short introduction session by myself. Time provided, we will end with a round table discussion for questions and answers.

http://photos4.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/9/8/3/2/event_158078962.jpeg

Mason Wendell, Creative Director / VP of Creative at Zivtech

Mason is a Design, CSS, HTML, and Drupal specialist who has been designing and building websites since the early days of the web. He has designed countless sites, written a custom content management system, and an active member of the Drupal community.

Mason's been a Sass user and vocal enthusiast for over four years. He's the creator behind Survival Kit and Breakpoint, co-creator of Sassy Modular Scale, coined the term Coding Designer, and author of many articles on Sass and Responsive Web Design for The Sass Way.

He also built one of the dumbest Sass experiments, sassymothereffingtextshadow.com (http://sassymothereffingtextshadow.com/)

Shrinking Websites on Phones

Making a desktop site design responsive is a tricky business. The design decisions made for wider screens don't really make sense on narrow ones, and the css used on wide or legacy sites can seriously stifle a fresh responsive approach. We're going to look at a case study in "mobile last" design, and talk about working with a non-responsive design and designer, converting a fixed desktop design for fluid and small screens, and handling large and unwieldily navigation on tiny little screens.

http://photos4.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/9/8/3/c/event_158078972.jpeg Josh Kill, Director of Platform at Squarespace

Josh Kill is a developer, designer, husband, and father living on an island in New York City. As Director of Platform at Squarespace, Josh is responsible for the design and direction of all user-facing Squarespace templates as well as Squarespace’s internal and external template development tools. As a former independent web developer, Josh uniquely understands the challenges faced by professionals working in web design. In his past lives, Josh has also been (in no particular order): a fireman, marine biologist, and commercial photographer.

In this Meetup, Josh will be talking about how we handled responsive design at Squarespace, putting an emphasis on the development of new templates and how each section of a website was uniquely built to adapt to multiple screens.

It Will Be Streamed

That's right folks! If you would like to get in on the action, we will be live streaming and (with any luck) recording this meetup! We are live streaming on the new Responsive Web Design NYC uStream Channel (http://www.ustream.tv/channel/responsive-web-design-nyc). The live stream will start approximately at 7:00pm and run until 9:30pm. At around 8:50pm-9:00pm, we are going to have a round table discussion featuring both speakers, Yaw, and myself. If you would like to ask us questions, even if you're not there, tweet your question and include the hashtag #rwdNYC (https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/%23rwdNYC) and we will do our best to get to them!

IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ!

Condé Nast will be hosting us on September 19th! If you are confirmed YES to the right, you can start showing up at 6:30pm. If you are on the Waitlist on the right, you can start showing up at 6:50pm and, if there are seats left from the 90 person capacity we have, you will be allowed in on a first-come, first-served basis. Please Note: the list has already been submitted. Even if a spot opens up here, I cannot change your RSVP in the list submitted to Condé. If you are on the waitlist, show up early to secure your spot! Presentations starting at 7:00pm. Due to security restrictions, you will need to bring ID with you. If you didn't get me your full name by the 12th, I can't guarantee Security will let you in even with ID, even if you're confirmed. I'm sorry about that, but it's their restriction, not mine. There is no food or drink allowed in the auditorium, so please don't bring any. Condé will have water bottles there for us.