Preserved Topic: Graphic Design to Web Design (Page 1 of 1)

I am now working with a graphic designer who has been doing pure graphic design, packaging, paper layout etc, for about 20 years.

I am now working with her in web design, and this is completely new to her.

My job with her would be to cut up her designs into a web page.

What I am wondering is what sort of things should I tell her to help the transition into web design much easier on the both of us.

I am thinking along the lines of taking you designs and making them easily able to be expanded to a percentage based design.

What tips do you all have to offer on this topic.

Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) tried and true.

IMHO the real difference between designing on packaging, etc and the web is that there are limits. Try to remind her that there are color and size limits.

A chat about the GIF vs. JPEG. Like when to use either and optimization problems.

John Allsopp ( http://www.westciv.com ) has written some wonderful, insightful things about web design as it stands unique and different from print design. I know at least one of his articles is archived at alistapart; others are sprinkled around his western civ site and the (excellent) courses he sells there. Allsopp is a CSS, separate-content-from-appearance "true believer", and I have to admit he makes a very persuasive arguement. I guess if I were to summarize what I got from reading his tutorials and essays it's: if you want to present print work on the web, post pdf files; if you want to play the web's strong suit, chuck what you know about print design out the window. The web is becoming all about accessibility - to viewers with hand held devices, to web TV, to blind surfers with browsers that read out loud, to fancy cell phones for pete's sake. The craft of designing for a fixed medium like print is very very different from that of designing for maximum accessibility in the totally uncontrollable environment that the web is. You can't reliably predict, let alone control, the size of the "page", the aspect ratio of the "page", the size and face of type or even the colors the "page" displays.

That's not to say there is no place left on the web for expreienced and sensitive graphic designers. Far from it. But they do have to be not only told but shown how the two mediums differ, and they do have to be willing to switch to a very alien way of thinking.

The KISS suggestion I'm afraid is a tad simplistic. Sophisticated, effective web design at the highest level of craft is anything but simple. Her mandate to "cut up her designs into a web page" is likewise overly simplistic, but not at all uncommon. It's the David Siegel "Killer Websites" aesthetic that jolted a generation of designers into a whole new level of control 6 years or so ago (my cherished, dog eared copy was published in 1996), and was so startlingly successful it's been the defacto standard since then, and ironically a tremendous barrier to significant contemporary web developement. Since then, the advent of xHTML and XML, CSS aware browsers and the variety of devices capable of seeing html content has exploded the fantasy of being able to make web pages look the same on every device, and design with the same precision of placement that paper offers.

So - if you work *for* her, you'll have to do what she wants. At the beginning, I'm sure that will mandate tables-based pages, struggling to keep all the little pieces "where they belong". That's sometimes what it means to work for someone. But in the long run, if she's serious about designing content for the web that takes advantages of all the fluidness and non-linear qualities that distinguish the web from print, you'll have to gently open her eyes to how the media differ, what you have to be willing to give up (mostly control), and what you stand to gain (a vastly broader, more diverse audience, the ability for anyone in that audience, anywhere, anytime to have access to a document on whatever web-connected device they happen to be sitting in fron of, the undirected, non-linear reading experience to name a few things).

I hope she's willing to be persuaded. It's not easy to grasp what this new media is all about, because on the surface it shares so many superficial similarities with print. It probably doesn't seem like "new media" to you, but if she's been a graphic designer for 20 years, she goes back to veloxes and stat cameras and mechanicals and xacto knives and paste ups. Dot etching and blue lines. Type setters and picas and Letraset press type! Figure part of your job is going to be showing her what it means to communicate effectively using a medium where control is not only impossible but fundamentally counterproductive!

Good luck. I hope it works out. Just don't get frustrated (as long as her willingness to learn is genuine). If she's a good designer, she'll understand at some deep level how to communicate graphically even if the "paper" feels like it shifts like sand. If you're a good teacher, she'll get over the disorientation of what must feel like being in space, where "up" and "down" cease to mean anything. Just keep reassuing her that, different though it may be, the internet needs sophisticated designers as much as it needs engineers and scripters!

Didn't Zeldman write some book to help print designers switch over to web design? Ah, yes, http://www.zeldman.com/talent/

Thanks for the responses. Steve thanks for all the time you must have put into writing that up. Do you have the exact link to the article, I had a hard time perusing the site.

Slime you sugesting she get that book?

I think Steve said it all better than I could. You can get software to convert nice graphics into a HTML-enabled format and having a human do it will make it slightly better but sliced and diced pages with some tables thrown at it to keep it in place (and some image maps too I'm sure) rather misses the point of the medium (although I'm sure very nice looking pages have been made his way). It seems a pity to waste your skills in such a manner WarMage. You should use her graphical ideas to create a working web page - it will require a lot of feedback between the two of you but should prove better for both of you in the long run. See if she can be talked around on this (pos. print out Steve's reply for her to read!!).

Emps


You're my wife now Dave

Well, I'm not sure how heavily she wants to get into web design. Give her the URL, there's a link there to read chapter three of the book; if she thinks it'll be helpful, she can get it.

I haven't read it myself.

I was actually just about to suggest that book Slime.

At my last job part of what i did was work with some awesomely talented print designers and help them transition to web design. The best way I found to work was to let them just design first, then we'd sit down and look at it and I'd say ok, this is great but this won't work, here's why. It's so hard to create this definitive "do's and don't's" list that I found it much easier to just work back and forth with them in the design process.

Good to see more people with graphic design knowledge moving from print to web tho, there's so few actual designers designing for the web these days

Chris


KAIROSinteractive

Well, I must confess my graphical skills are a bit lax... or so I should say, I have none.

However, if i pawn this off on here, I can spend my time working in a nice database to handles some pages for 5000 domain names.

-mage-

"A dao of Web Design".

I love this guy. After reading this article, back up a level and read some of his other articles.

Great article.