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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.