Very nice article.

I’m interested in this question of spatial relationships and proportions, and the possibility of conveying ideas and feelings through the arrangement of visual elements.

There’s a book by Keith Critchlow called Islamic Patterns that I found to be an interesting read. He describes the geometric understructures of works such as can be found in the Alhambra in Spain. The surfaces upon which the many tiled patterns are constructed are flat, curved, and/or domed. But, even here we have some set boundaries.

When the boundaries are no longer set (as in the case of the Web) then it sounds like it would be a good idea to design from the inside out. This way at least some internal relationships can be established.

The difficulty that I find is that with almost all of the current responsive sites even these carefully composed internal relationships are subject to getting automatically rearranged whenever the site visitor resizes his or her browser window.

I feel that this kind of rearrangement, in turn, destabilizes the integrity (and with that the idea/feeling) of the original composition.

The other approach seems to be to set the website up using a fixed layout, and to then do several different compositions for different screen sizes. However, the latest trends seem do really discourage fixed layouts. I’m not sure why.

Can anyone shed some light on how I might be able find a way out of this dilemma?

Thanks.