“A design variation that doesn’t make sense”

Feb 14, 2026

A good quick essay by Ahmad Shadeed about a mistake I bet I committed myself, too – switching to a full-width style too soon with responsive design, which makes pages look strange:

Shadeed argues that this ugly responsive interregnum happens a lot more than people might assume, as part of natural window management on larger screens. If you un-maximize the window, use one of the many split-screen features, or something like link preview, it might push the browser into a width slice you might have thought was not actually realistically occupied.

Also, what caught my attention at the bottom of the post was this smart visualization. I wish the responsive design features in my browser’s web inspector did this kind of thing automatically: