Consider a scenario. You're doing well in your profession, sitting down with a coffee to work on the designs for a website for a medium-to-large business. You're confronted with the site map in Visio, a brief from the client, the "brand book" for the company, and the copy all written by the copywriters. You know that your job is to bring together the disparate elements into something pleasingly non-offensive which efficiently delivers the pre-arranged content and message.
The site will likely have a menu down the left, content in the middle, cross-promotional items down the right, and be topped and tailed with an elegant branded header and subdued footer. Really all you're doing is choosing some colours and making sure everyone can find what they're looking for.
And that's how it should be, because this formula *works*. It's what everyone from the client to the user expects to see. But what it's not is a creative process. You don't want to rock that particular boat too much because the site will become harder to build and use.
Consider our offline cousins. On the print side, designers will be creating tightly targeted printed materials, often linked to a particular campaign. They'll be able to create inventive layouts, tinkering with their design grids to create tension, and peppering the piece with elegant typography. Then they'll fret for hours over paper samples, folding techniques, die-cutting and spot colours. The finished piece will be a marvel to see and hold, and it'll smell *great*.
The reasons for this schism between online and offline are many. Technological and accessibility issues constrain design decisions on the Web, holding back more innovative and elegant work, but often the website is still seen as the poor cousin of print by the client, with a budget to match. Perhaps the hundreds of years of print history will inevitably outweigh the last decade or so of online design, or maybe your computer screen simply can't compete with holding a beautifully crafted brochure in your hands.
A website is a much more complicated beast than a brochure in terms of information. How many printed corporate communications aim to explain an entire product range, all the services a company can offer, and the history of the company, plus encourage customer interaction, all wrapped up in a nice bundle that evokes the brand? The expectation of print to be focused allows for design decisions based on space, elegance, consistency and creativity, in a way that a sprawling website could never hope to match. A website is always a compromise, and hence, at some level, a disappointment.
Of course, the Web has much creative potential in the realm of user interaction, and indeed print can never match the Web for this kind of continent-spanning immersion. But this is the province of the coder rather than the traditional designer, and this is where the creativity really lies.
It used to be that Web design was seen as the "rock n' roll" of design, with print designers flocking in their thousands to the new exciting frontier of mass communication. As the Web medium grows up, however, it's increasingly looking as though designers who want to be visually creative should head back to the world of glue, scissors and arguments over Quark and InDesign.
Agree, or disagree?
Simon
ELATED : )
--
ELATED : )
http://www.PageKits.com
Professional Website Templates
The site will likely have a menu down the left, content in the middle, cross-promotional items down the right, and be topped and tailed with an elegant branded header and subdued footer. Really all you're doing is choosing some colours and making sure everyone can find what they're looking for.
And that's how it should be, because this formula *works*. It's what everyone from the client to the user expects to see. But what it's not is a creative process. You don't want to rock that particular boat too much because the site will become harder to build and use.
Consider our offline cousins. On the print side, designers will be creating tightly targeted printed materials, often linked to a particular campaign. They'll be able to create inventive layouts, tinkering with their design grids to create tension, and peppering the piece with elegant typography. Then they'll fret for hours over paper samples, folding techniques, die-cutting and spot colours. The finished piece will be a marvel to see and hold, and it'll smell *great*.
The reasons for this schism between online and offline are many. Technological and accessibility issues constrain design decisions on the Web, holding back more innovative and elegant work, but often the website is still seen as the poor cousin of print by the client, with a budget to match. Perhaps the hundreds of years of print history will inevitably outweigh the last decade or so of online design, or maybe your computer screen simply can't compete with holding a beautifully crafted brochure in your hands.
A website is a much more complicated beast than a brochure in terms of information. How many printed corporate communications aim to explain an entire product range, all the services a company can offer, and the history of the company, plus encourage customer interaction, all wrapped up in a nice bundle that evokes the brand? The expectation of print to be focused allows for design decisions based on space, elegance, consistency and creativity, in a way that a sprawling website could never hope to match. A website is always a compromise, and hence, at some level, a disappointment.
Of course, the Web has much creative potential in the realm of user interaction, and indeed print can never match the Web for this kind of continent-spanning immersion. But this is the province of the coder rather than the traditional designer, and this is where the creativity really lies.
It used to be that Web design was seen as the "rock n' roll" of design, with print designers flocking in their thousands to the new exciting frontier of mass communication. As the Web medium grows up, however, it's increasingly looking as though designers who want to be visually creative should head back to the world of glue, scissors and arguments over Quark and InDesign.
Agree, or disagree?
Simon
ELATED : )
--
ELATED : )
http://www.PageKits.com
Professional Website Templates
