Device widths gave me convenient numbers; content pressure revealed when the catalogue actually needed a different layout rule.
#responsive-design
Learning to design rules instead of screenshots while rebuilding a fixed-width catalogue for an unpredictable web.
CSS made product photographs fit a phone while the network still delivered the desktop originals, forcing image cost into the design itself.
Turning a product comparison into stacked cards made the narrow layout prettier and the comparison task dramatically worse.
The catalogue needed one semantic set of destinations that could change presentation without becoming a second, reduced mobile information architecture.
Responsive layout became much easier after the catalogue stopped treating every field as equally important and every empty value as the same kind of absence.
A polished desktop composition taught me almost nothing about how the catalogue should behave when content, width, input, and loading conditions changed.