Ebb, Meet Flow: Intrinsic Design in a Nutshell

In 2020, the gifted makers of websites at Clearleft shared methods to achieve fluid responsive design. “Utopian” web design was (and still is) their half-kidding name for this approach, which Apple’s Jen Simmons, working indendently, called “intrinsic design.” Instead of chasing an ever-changing number of fixed breakpoints, utopian or intrinsic design follows the web’s intrinsic ebbs and flows via fluid type scales that are always in tune with the screen on which they’re viewed. In a nutshell: The big idea that triggered this train of thought now seems very simple: Define a type scale for a small screen Define a type scale for a large screen Tell the browser to interpolate between the two scales, based on the current viewport width This results in a set of type sizes which is always “in tune” with itself and feels at home on any device, without needing to manually specify sizes for x number of arbitrary breakpoints. For example we can just say H2s are always “size 4” and trust the…