Responsive Platforms - Grid or Gridless?

Question

I wanted to get opinions on Responsive Design approach, both for designers and developers. My experience has been thus far using a gridless approach, where media queries change DOM elements at the needed breakpoints. This has allowed me to be very nimble for accommodating design specifications. Sometimes I get a "grid" design that just doesn't break down to the right number of columns and that would screw up using a standard grid system like bootstrap (though I realize you can easily customize bootstrap to a certain degree). For example, I once received a design having layouts for 10, 8, 5, and 2 columns.

My concerns are that I'm perhaps:

• Making the whole implementation harder than it is.
• Ending up with complicated, fragile (and sometimes spaghetti) CSS.
• Making future development more difficult.

I'd appreciate any opinions regarding pros and cons on using a Responsive grid or going custom gridless. Do we need to keep the designers on their toes and QA the design as per platform? Is there more flexibility to grids that there seems to be?

I'd prefer to start using either Foundation of Bootstrap, but any recommendations are welcome. Thanks!

Answer 1

Last year we started to use Twitter Bootstrap http://twitter.github.io/bootstrap/ and it became an excelent way to guide the responsive design on our web application.

Take a look and check the benefits that you can get. For us, the most benefits were: - Cross-browser & Responsive (of course); - Guide with great documentation to developers (that probably was the greater); - Ease and simplicity;