Grids have been a foundational design tool for decades and perhaps much longer. It would seem ubiquitous to any design practice. However, the web was built as a different medium and it is inappropriate to consider it in the same way as more traditional forms of the past. The act of overlaying a grid onto existing alignment algorithms is arguably more trouble than the results are worth.

How might we leverage existing layout rules to achieve responsive design?

The “gridless” web design mentality aims to educate folks from traditional design backgrounds in the way of web layout and to harness the power of existing layout engineering to create well-aligned compositions without highly curated constraints. It recommends allowing content to dictate the size of containers because, on the web, user preferences come first.