Headspace Design

9 reasons web design is more fun than print design

Posted On September 6th, 2009 Author Kyle Racki  Filed Under Design   5

For years, web designers have not gotten the respect of print or interior designers in the greater design community. Need proof? Take a look at any design annual or magazine such as Communication Arts, AIGA, or any of the design competitions or award shows. Web is always it’s own category, and simple, well-designed sites are rarely considered for web awards, with most judges favoring big-budget Flash sites featuring embedded video and gimmicky games.

With this stigma attached to web design, many designers coming out of school are turned off by designing for the web, thinking of it as a limiting platform for design. After all, with print you aren’t limited by available fonts, screen resolutions or bandwidth. The world is your oyster with print, at least in their minds, while web is the unfortunate necessity you have no choice but to design for. But I thought I’d outline reasons why designing for the web can be more fun than designing a print piece. Some might say that some of these reasons are actually more in print’s favor, but I disagree, as you’ll see:

1. People use the web

Sure, people use print too, such as in the case of newspapers, magazines or catalogs. But generally speaking, users visit a website, sometimes daily, in order to find information. Print is easily discarded, while a user will return to a website time and again to buy products, view editorial content, or interact with a social community. (There’s a reason the newspaper industry is hurting, and many publishing companies are scrambling to switch their advertisers over to the web.)

It is this general nature of websites that make it more fun to design for—you have to always be thinking about usability, unlike print where you are mostly thinking about visual interest first. The left/right brain mentality of always designing with the user in mind is what makes the web so fun to design for.

2. Users can contribute to a website

The idea of readers of media contributing their thoughts and opinions is not new. For a long time people have been interested in submitting ‘letters to the editor’ in order to get their rantings published. The beauty of the web is that it’s so much easier, and without as much of the screening process of traditional editorial—users ideas, intelligent or not, can get out there for people to see.

This presents an interesting design challenge. How can you visually allow for content that will grow, expand and change long after you’ve designed the website? That challenge, to create a flexible information scheme that will allow for change, is fascinating to be faced with as a web designer.

3. You don’t know which device your audience will be using

Print is so easy in some respects. When you design an 8 page brochure, you know exactly how big it will be, how close people will be viewing it, what material it will be printed on and so on.

With the web, there is an endless variety of ways users can see a site or application. Some of your users may be viewing it on an outdated 800 x 600 screen resolution, so the site will appear big and bulky with little white space, while others may be on a massive 30” flat panel, resulting in the website appearing tiny taking up little of the screen.

Other users still might be on a mobile device, be it an iPhone, a Blackberry or a Razr, people use the web very differently on these devices than when using a desktop PC. Let’s not even get started on browsers; Firefox, Internet Explorer 6-8, Safari, Chrome, Opera, Camino, there are so many browsers out there and many do not interpret HTML and CSS the same way which can have disasterous effects on your design.

The challenge of designing for so many unknowns presents a difficult, yet satisfying challenge when your end product is accessible, and enjoyable to use on a variety of browsers and devices.

4. Separation of content and design makes your website design easy to update

Sure, the print world has Adobe InDesign and QuarkXpress, both of which offer style sheets and master pages which allow for templating pages and easy updating of text. But how often are print designs done in Photoshop or Illustrator? In these applications, it can be time consuming and difficult to update your designs.

The beauty of modern web design is that structure (XHTML) is separate from data (Database), which is separate from behavior (Javascript and server-side code) which is separate from aesthetics (CSS). WIth this separation of all of the elements means it is generally painless to update one without touching the other. Want to style a comment form that sits on hundreds of existing blog posts? No need to go by through one-by-one, just edit the style sheet, and presto! Every form across the whole website is updated to reflect your design choices.

That sure beats suffering through Photoshop layers.

5. You can’t animate print design

Maybe with the exception of pop-up books or flip-books, print material does not animate. And while we are comparing apples and oranges, the fun of designing an interface is that animation presents a whole other box of tools in your design arsenal.

While Flash animations of the web 1.0 era has left a bad taste in many mouths, the fact is, being able to show/hide panels of information, and fade or slide in images can add a lot to the user-experience. Even when appropriate, being able to embed video or animate text and images in Flash can be entertaining for the end-user. The ability to add sound, motion and video to a web interface, if done with good taste, gives you so much more to experiment with as a creative professional.

6. A client can update their content

This is often seen as a bad thing, especially when designing with a particular CMS in mind. But once you get used to the idea, letting clients manage their content creates a strange kind of therapeutic notion of letting your little baby bird fly away, not know what kind of adventures will come it’s way.

Okay, that’s a bit over the top, but it’s true that, while it can be disheartening to see a client with poor taste and little self control mangle your beautiful design with bad content, it can also be exhilarating to come back to visit a site you designed six months ago, and see that the client has kept it up-to-date with engaging content.

7. Visually impaired users can still enjoy your website’s content

When you think about it, a website is kind of like a print-piece that has Braille automatically built in. In other words, if you design and build your site to standards, with clean, semantic mark-up, add properly described alt attributes to images to name a few things, your website can be enjoyed by disabled users using a screen reader.

This doesn’t necessarily make it fun to design for, but it is something the modern web designer is always thinking about as he or she designs. Which is partially why, as an example, web designers use unordered lists styled with CSS image replacement instead of a table of images. The visual result is the same, but done the proper way, visually impaired users can still use your site’s navigation. The feeling of knowing that you’re building something accessible to all is satisfying, even fun in itself, isn’t it?

8. Users can always print out your website—not the other way around.

While the notion of a paperless office is an ideal worth striving for, the fact is, most users who want to read long articles would prefer to print out a web page instead of reading on the screen. With CSS, you can even specify a unique style sheet for the website when it’s printed, allowing for things like hiding interface elements, search bars, and colours that drain ink usage, and providing a simple, attractive black and white text layout that makes use of the paper space, which will make users much happier to read when they print it out.

While creating a print style sheet isn’t exactly fun in itself, knowing users can print the website content and comfortable read it adds to the overall user experience.

9. No nasty print errors

Print designers know that dreaded phone call all too well. The printer has an issue with your InDesign files, or worse, the client has received the printed copies and all of the images printed low res, or there’s a typo, or there was mis-registration of the colours. You know the drill. Just knowing there are the potential with those kinds of errors can cause undue anxiety on a designer.

Of course, when designing for the web, you need to be cognizant of errors, and we all know that things will go wrong, especially when viewing the site using Internet Explorer. But here’s the difference—when something goes wrong on the web, you fix it. You don’t need to start from scratch and re-develop the website. Having that safety net makes the web more fun to design for.

Those are my thoughts. If you have any more, please leave them in the comments below, or if you are an enraged print designer, please leave your opinion below as well.