Mark Boulton

17 Responses to “Yes, we know the web is not print”

1. 
   Jeff Croft said on: January 2nd, 2007 at 1:32 am

   Amen! I’ve been say­ing sim­ilar things to the people who will listen. Yes, the web is not print, but there are hun­dreds of years of design exper­i­ence crammed into the minds of design­ers lucky enough to have a print back­ground, and we’d be totally fool­ish not to make use of it. 

   There are many dif­fer­ences between the medi­ums, but there are many sim­il­ar­it­ies, too. There is a lot that can be learned from print designed and applied on the web. 

   Any­one who says oth­er­wise doesn’t get it.

2. 
   Richard said on: January 2nd, 2007 at 1:59 am

   Ha, I remem­ber read­ing that! I remem­ber think­ing ‘What a load of bol­locks’. Second­ing you on this one Mark. :)

3. 
   Louis Simoneau said on: January 2nd, 2007 at 2:35 am

   From a graphic designer’s per­spect­ive, the state­ment that Web Design is not Print Design may appear hol­low, but that’s only the case if you’re only con­sid­er­ing the visual aspect of the design (i.e., in print, the designer con­trols the appear­ance of everything, whereas on the web he must accom­mod­ate a vari­ety of pos­sible user agents which can modify the way the design will end up appearing.) 

   How­ever, the more fun­da­mental dif­fer­ence between the two, and, in my opin­ion, the one with which we need to con­cern ourselves as web design­ers, is the very nature of the media, and the way in which it is consumed: 

   Print media is read.  Web media is inter­ac­ted with.

   I agree with your point that print design exper­i­ence can help you to be a bet­ter web designer.  But I think it can also hurt, if you let it get in the way of your inter­ac­tion design, which I (as I’ve said) tend to believe is the fun­da­mental level of design for the web. 

   Just my two cents.  Thanks for the art­icle, and for invit­ing discussion!

4. 
   Nigel Duckworth said on: January 2nd, 2007 at 4:22 am

   I com­pletely agree. Too often the fact that “the web is not print” is used as an excuse to remain ignor­ant about design. In my view the basic prin­ciples of design are uni­ver­sal, and web design­ers should learn and apply them to the par­tic­u­lar medium they’re work­ing in. Print design­ers are well versed in these prin­ciples, in my exper­i­ence most web design­ers are not.

   So, no a web page is not a prin­ted page, but web design is design, and if you’re going to call your­self a web designer you need to know the basics of design the­ory, those prin­ciples that tran­scend any par­tic­u­lar medium.  

   Now it’s Janu­ary, where’s my book?

5. 
   Wilson Miner said on: January 2nd, 2007 at 5:21 am

   I agree that deal­ing with prin­ted comps is much more imme­di­ate and handy for design reviews in gen­eral. The biggest prob­lem I have with review­ing web comps on paper is that it encour­ages you to eval­u­ate the whole thing as one com­plete com­pos­i­tion, which is usu­ally never vis­ible at once on screen. There’s a cer­tain exper­i­ence of scrolling in sequence over the indi­vidual screens within the entire page com­pos­i­tion that doesn’t trans­late well to prin­ted comps. No mat­ter how much you know that it’s going to be on screen, you’re still look­ing at and eval­u­at­ing some­thing that’s never really going to exist, which some­times leads to mis­guided feed­back and design decisions.

6. 
   Mark Boulton said on: January 2nd, 2007 at 12:00 pm

   Louis: I dis­agree. Print media is inter­ac­ted with. Books, magazines, news­pa­pers etc all have to be nav­ig­ated by the user. Take an encyc­lo­pe­dia for example. They are not read in a lin­ear fash­ion, the reader has to nav­ig­ate to what they want to find; very sim­ilar to a web­site wouldn’t you agree? 

   It is a mis­take to con­sider print design­ers just con­cerned with the visual. It’s not the case. Good graphic design­ers con­sider the brief and try to solve the prob­lem regard­less of the deliv­ery medium. 

   Nigel: It’s com­ing, it’s com­ing! There’s a whole month of Janu­ary left yet ;)

   Wilson: That’s a good point. I’m not sug­gest­ing that paper replaces screen in every instance. I reckon there should be a bal­ance of the two, or rather for the designer to use what is com­fort­able to them in any given present­a­tion. If I were present­ing user flow through a web applic­a­tion for example, I would do this on screen (or maybe paper pro­to­types if it were early on in the process).

7. 
   figgy said on: January 2nd, 2007 at 11:14 pm

   What a designer designs in Pho­toshop and presents to the cli­ent on paper should be exactly what the cli­ent sees on the screen after you com­plete the front-end coding. 

   This is simply a mat­ter of know­ing your CSS/XHTML and stand­ards (not in any order as they are used in synergy). 

   It’s that simple.

8. 
   Benson said on: January 7th, 2007 at 7:16 pm

   I’m just a bit late to the discussion. 

   The art­icle was try­ing to sep­ar­ate the “design” from Print and Web, which I believe was the prob­lem. Design is a form of com­mu­nic­a­tion, both visual and inter­act­ive. I agree with Mark that books is inher­ently inter­act­ive, purely by the tact­ile fea­tures of book design (which I won’t go into). I think we are also miss­ing the fact that print design is a gen­eric present­a­tion of all prin­ted designs. Print design is in fact over many medi­ums; books, posters, pack­aging, bill­boards and much more. 

   Just because web is digital does not mean the design pro­cess is any dif­fer­ent. Graphic design prin­ciples are always the same regard­less of web or print. Good design is always work­ing with the medium to solve a com­mu­nic­a­tion challenge.

9. 
   Clay Mabbitt said on: January 8th, 2007 at 10:16 pm

   I’m a big fan of using a prin­tout and the screen when present­ing design ideas to a cli­ent.  The screen gives a (more or less) exact resp­resent­a­tion of the inter­ac­tion a vis­itor would have with the web site.  Mean­while the prin­tout has the already men­tioned advant­ages as a tool to make notes, exam­ine cer­tain areas in detail, and refer back to later.

   Obvi­ously that’s when you have a screen avail­able, and prin­touts can serve as an addi­tional present­a­tion tool.  The About.com art­icle almost seems to be imply­ing that if the only option is to present your web design port­fo­lio in prin­ted form, you’re bet­ter off not doing the present­a­tion at all.  I haven’t had too many instances where I wasn’t able to use a screen in a present­a­tion, but surely the answer in those cases is not to just walk away?

10. 
    JPSzcz said on: January 9th, 2007 at 9:41 am

    Figgy: I must dis­agree with your statement. 

    What a designer designs in Pho­toshop and presents to the cli­ent on paper should be exactly what the cli­ent sees on the screen after you com­plete the front-end coding.

    What is on paper only cap­tures the design in that instance, with those parameters. 

    A design on the web is fluid, it is dynamic, the para­met­ers in which it is presen­ted are always chan­ging. From screen size, to win­dowsize, to color dif­fer­ences from screen to screen, to user-adjusted text size, there are just too many factors that influ­ence design on the web, and show­ing paper comps without on-screen ver­sions is just irresponsible. 

    I am con­stantly telling my cli­ents to look at the designs on mul­tiple screens so that they can com­pare the col­ors, not to men­tion the size on dif­fer­ent res­ol­u­tion screens. No mat­ter how much I ask though, there always seems to be someone that doesn’t do it until the end of a pro­ject, ask­ing “Why do the col­ors look dif­fer­ent on my home computer?” 

    When I talk to oth­ers about the chal­lenges of design for the web, I always say “Ima­gine hav­ing a magazine, that was a dif­fer­ent size and with dif­fer­ent fonts depend­ing on which cof­fee table it was placed on.” I think that is the fun­da­mental dif­fer­ence between static (print) and dynamic (web) design.

11. 
    Wanderer said on: January 10th, 2007 at 8:26 pm

    I have to agree with JPSzcz here. It is wrong to lead a cli­ent to believe that it is pos­sible, or even desir­able, to pro­duce exactly the same res­ults on every pos­sible browser, screen type, etc. That takes us back to the bad old days of “This page best viewed with…” and worse. Even if your web page was a single mono­lithic graphic, to pre­serve every detail of present­a­tion exactly the way the designer inten­ded it, it would still not look exactly the same to any two users. 

    Moreover, more often than not it is, or appears to be, design­ers’ van­ity which drives them to want to con­trol every aspect of present­a­tion. A com­mon example is over­rid­ing browser pref­er­ences with text-decoration: under­line on links. The designer’s arrog­ance in decid­ing that his design looks its best with the links under­lined becomes an access­ib­il­ity issue for people who find it dif­fi­cult to read under­lined text on screen. So, he will force that under­lin­ing to get the look he wants, even at the expense of the actual usab­il­ity of the page.

    The prob­lem comes in when people who say “Web design is not print” are really say­ing that “Web design is not design.” Of course it is design. But it’s design for a dif­fer­ent medium. It makes no more sense to try to force a Web page, by its very intent and pur­pose a dynamic, user-interpreted medium, to try to func­tion the same way as a prin­ted page, any more than it makes sense to try to make a bill­board func­tion the same way as a magazine. A good designer embraces the nature of the medium and works with it rather than fights it and tries to force it to be whatever he is more famil­iar with.

12. 
    Benson said on: January 10th, 2007 at 9:07 pm

    Wan­derer: Think you are miss­ing the point. Prin­ted con­cepts within the pro­cess of cli­ent dis­cus­sions are effect­ive is get­ting feed­back, espe­cially before the concept is coded into markup. How would you get feed­back early with cli­ent? Spend the time to code and scripta concept with cli­ent poten­tial scrap­ping the whole thing? Con­cep­tual stage is just that. 

    Once cli­ent have signed-off then by all means markup the pro­to­type and review/test on tar­geted browser.

13. 
    Wanderer said on: January 11th, 2007 at 12:45 am

    Ben­son: I’m not arguing against prin­ted con­cepts. I use them myself, and for the reas­ons stated. The scribbled-on res­ults go into the pro­ject file. (then six months later I go blind try­ing to decode someone’s the scrib­bling, and real­ize to my dis­may that it’s MINE!) 

    What I’m say­ing is that it’s irre­spons­ible for a designer to mis­lead the cli­ent into think­ing that’s what their web­site is going to look like for every pos­sible user, or that it would be a good thing to force every­one to see it exactly the same way. It might make life hell for the people who came from the print design world, but Web design doesn’t, and shouldn’t, work that way. The fact that the per­son view­ing it can change how they view it (or hear it, or feel it) to suit their needs is a vir­tue of the medium to be embraced, not a flaw to be fought against. That’s some­thing a lot of design­ers miss.

    Me, I’m a geek who learned to design, rather than a designer who learned to geek. I star­ted as a pro­gram­mer, so I tend to have a user-centric idea of how a web­site should work. I see the people who try to force Web pages to work just like prin­ted pages as tak­ing a meta­phor too far. Design is design, whether it’s a design for a bill­board or a magazine page or a web­site or a T-shirt. But it has to work with its medium, not against it. Ima­gine if T-shirts were covered in small print, with a note at the bot­tom say­ing “please turn per­son” (they exist).  Or ima­gine if magazine ads con­sisted of noth­ing but pho­tos of the advertiser’s bill­boards. That would, in most cases, be a hor­rible waste of the strengths of the media in ques­tion. Like­wise, it’s just as idi­otic to try to make a Web page work just like a prin­ted page. We laugh at the people who think scan­ning the pages of their print cata­log and put­ting up the res­ult­ing ginorm­ous images online as a “web­site” is a good idea … but it’s only the most extreme expres­sion of the con­fu­sion between Web and print.

14. 
    figgy said on: January 11th, 2007 at 1:12 pm

    I think some of you guys missed my point. 

    Indeed, we are able to make the Pho­toshop design look exactly the same way in the tar­get browser.  It’s just a mat­ter of know­ing how to make it hap­pen in the cod­ing phase.  And sure, the web­site is “dynamic”, but link col­ors and other func­tion­al­ity stuff is also dis­cussed at the same time the design comp is presen­ted. And sure, color may change slightly from mon­itor to mon­itor as well as screen res­ol­u­tion, but it’s still the same. 

    The prin­tout serves as a tool for com­pre­hens­ive eli­cit­a­tion.  Finally, there is noth­ing wrong or “irre­spons­ible” (that was a com­ical com­ment) about present­ing the cli­ent with a prin­ted ver­sion.  At the stage of the pro­cess, we should be look­ing for as much feed­back as possible.

15. 
    Ben Grogan said on: January 15th, 2007 at 11:48 pm

    “They can engage with paper, scribble all over or tear up and throw in the bin. You can­not do that with a screen. Paper is more imme­di­ate and less precious.” 

    I have, acci­dent­ally, dis­covered the won­ders of present­ing designs to the cli­ent as a pro­jec­tion onto a white board. Given dry erase mark­ers, they can scribble, draw and move things, all the while keep­ing the design off paper. 

    It has worked for a couple of dif­fi­cult cli­ents quite wonderfully.

16. 
    minxlj said on: January 16th, 2007 at 7:33 am

    I agree with Nigel’s com­ment — design is design. The basic prin­ciples remain, whatever the medium you’re work­ing with. 

    I con­sider myself lucky that as a 28-yr-old designer, I have a solid print back­ground and also a good web/interactive design ground­ing. I do find that a lot of new design­ers simply have not been taught the basic prin­ciples, and that’s quite wor­ry­ing — how­ever tal­en­ted they are.

17. 
    Julian Schrader said on: January 18th, 2007 at 3:56 pm

    Thank you for once again point­ing this out. I think this is a very import­ant step in under­stand­ing the way the web works.