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.

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

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!

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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