My thoughts are that an artist is different to a designer. Artists depict the world that THEY want to see or the world that THEY DO see. A designer creates for a purpose, not just an expression. Lets be honest, a designer creates things to make him money or to make his clients money.

The point I am attempting to make is that it would be unhealthy for clients if we designed simply from our own personal perspective and opinion. Target audiences, marketing messages, images, content, design styles and logo’s, all make up the brand of a company. This need to be relevant to their consumers otherwise they will not make money. This goes for any company (or person) in any sector in my view.

Therefore even if we are talking of personal blogs, the design still needs to create an atmosphere of familiarity. If its a blog about hard rock you wouldn’t expect a pink and fluffy design. If your main blogging subject was Barbie dolls you wouldn’t want the design to be black and scratchy.

So no matter how you dress, or what cover you have on your ipod, to me, it doesn’t matter one bit. You need to drop your personal view on life and try to look at things from your target audiences perspective. I don’t think that art is the same as design but would agree that “design imitates life” - it has to otherwise we wouldn’t be able to help our clients sell things. This is my humble opinion and please don’t take it the wrong way!

Keep up the good work.

In part, I’d agree: design styles on the web are definitely taking-on a form all of their own, representing styles that the designer(s) themselves don’t incorporate elsewhere.

The differences in style between web design and print media are not as far removed as your article suggests though - layouts, typography and images used are very similar for both media types….

I don’t think a difference in style and design itself is what is exposed as much as the difference in skills and tools involved. That is why I agree with this particular sentiment: …’There can be really excellent web designers and horrific print designers’ but only because when was the last time you saw a Print Designer who was excellent with HTML and CSS, and in contrast, when was the last time you saw a Web Designer master the art of print design for similar reasons? That’s where the divide really shows up (and not so much in style/design itself)

It also has this queer responsibility of needing to play well with other sites. Communication Arts needn’t concern itself with a reader’s jumping between its print articles and I.D.’s print articles. But their websites do; to an extent, web designer-created standards are in place to give users a consistent experience of the Internet, not just of individual sites. That’s a radically different missiont that certainly sets web design apart as its own field.

Design or illustration can be that too, though the message needs to be clear and definitely not cryptic or two-fold!

I sure there are other print design rules that web design constantly breaks.