Design Matters: Designing for a web design compared to a print design

After we had shared on our previous experience in the fundamental difference between a website design and a print design, in this issue of design matters, we will be touching on the difference in designing for these 2 very different media.

First and foremost, you will need to understand their differences. We will touch on 2 of the key areas that differs between website design and print design can be compared in some major areas.

Types of media

Audience

Types of Media
As simple as it may sound, TILT decided not to leave any tables unturn and just elaborate a little bit more on the above.

As a print designer, projects which you will handle can be:

Magazine advertisements

Product design and packaging

Corporate Identity and stationaries

Brochures, reports, posters and banners

While as a web designer, projects which you will handle can be:

Standard HTML websites

Flash websites

Electronic Newsletters

Electronic Direct Mailers

The softwares which you use will be fundamentally different as well. As a print designer, you will realised you are constantly opening up Adobe Indesign, Adobe Illustrator, Freehand and of course Adobe Photoshop. As a web designer, the softwares are largely Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe Photoshop. Some may use text pad, note pad, sharepoint designer or perhaps even microsoft frontpage.

Audience
Typically, when you attend a project design brief, you will find yourself asking your client, “Who is the target audience?”. This is where you will find that the difference begins.

In print design, the marketing message is the king! Faced with a very limited area, it is important for you to capture your audience in the shortest amount of time for the message to stay for the longest period. Of course, physical property such as texture, shape (remember when we mentioned form in our previous post), will assist you in achieving your goal. However, on the web, you need to try to keep your audience within your website for the longest possible time. You find that you constantly tease your audience with snippets of content to get them to navigate them around. Animation, navigation, sound and interactivity all play a part in this area. The key difference? You have unlimited number of pages to play with!

The fact is that anything that is a great print design is likely to be a lousy web design. Understanding the limitation and playing to the strength will allow you to come up with better design.

“Know the rules, then break them!”

Sounds familiar?