Web Design Ireland

It’s a problem many developers have come up against in their career - working with a traditional print designer that thinks that design is design is design. Worse still is a corporate environment that fails to understand the same, with the result being that the finished solution is likely to be substandard.

Unfortunately the skill set needed to create a successful offline magazine campaign or brochure are nothing close to what are needed for a successful online presence, or website. Jacob agrees.

I’ve blogged before about development mistakes that designers make, however this is a bit deeper than that.

The skills gap is great, and one which needs to be addressed with training if a print designer is tasked with creating a website design.  Likewise if a web designer is asked to create a print campaign for a magazine, the skills needed are vastly different. Here are the differences from what I can see.

The Tools.

Firstly the move from using a print tool such as Adobe Indesign or Quark to using a web based tool such as Fireworks or Photoshop needs to be made. With this comes a whole host of issues.

 Print designers don’t seem to know how to create a design that works on a screen of a certain size - I’ve had to deal with designers creating site designs in Quark or InDesign which need brought into Fireworks or Photoshop firstly resized and then resliced.

This can mean that text is then too small for users to read on buttons - even though it is beautifully anti-alised inside something like Quark. The lack of layers inside these formats, when imported then has the additional problem of text not being editable, which means that you end up going back and forward asking for simple text changes to buttons.

The Formats.

Traditional print designers tend not to worry too much about file formats or understanding them, as most DTP packages support multiple formats. Print designers love their high resolution images, in fact they are born and bred on the motto that “high res is best” - because it is - for print.

Web designers on the other hand know that on the web, smaller is better, and as such know how to squeeze every inch of compression out of a JPEG, or know when to use a flat coloured gif instead to get a balance between crisp graphics and speed.

And don’t get me started on Flash.

I’ve had traditional print designers tell me that they are Flash wizards and can create brilliant flash layouts and designs for websites. Wrong. If they don’t understand the points below, you can look forward to bandwidth heavy, preloader ridden, unnavigatable, “looks-good-but-is-functionally-rubbish” flash. Knowing the applications for flash, and when it isn’t appropriate is a skill in itself, and from what I’ve found is only present in web designers. If you are going to develop in flash in today’s environment you’d better also be a code wizard.

I’ve yet to meet a traditional print designer that can code their way out of a paper bag. Feel free to put your hands up in the comments.

The Colour.

Traditional Print designers don’t know what the Web Colour Pallette is, and whilst this isn’t as important today with many people running at 16 million pixels etc etc. It is still important when it comes to developing for an audience that are likely to be running older machines.

Accessibility

Print designers generally haven’t a clue on this one, and how it should influence their design.

The Layout.

Print designers have the luxury of placing things where they look best on the page, and that is as far as it goes. If it looks good - then it is signed off. Job done. Web designers on the other hand, know that usability is a contributing factor to a website’s success, and thus have to go a bit deeper than what just looks good. The placement of elements on the page will result in someone being able to browse easily or not, and for that reason a certain amount of web savvy is needed.

The Interface

Web designers by definition - are interface developers. They have to know what will contribute to actions and process when someone browses a site, and have to think about “what happens when a button is clicked” or “what way will a menu scroll”. This mode of thinking for a traditional print designer is out of the ordinary because as I’ve stated once a design is looking good, that’s the end of the process. The result can be having to ask the designer “what about X” or “what happens when X is clicked”.

Unfortunately, without an understanding of the web, and what works and what doesn’t you are likely to get a final product which doesn’t meet the requirements of the web, or the requirements of your customers. On a positive note, print designers do tend to push the boundaries and refuse to take “no that won’t work online” for an answer - forcing us as developers to find a solution to something which would ordinarily be thrown out as a bad idea by a web designer.