I had the opportunity to work with a print designer on one of the projects. In the discussions the realisation dawned that we started talking of two different media - print and web. It took some time for me to convince the designer that there were differences between the two which might affect the designs and approaches. However, it took long uncomfortable time to even list out the differences.

I imagine this scenario would be faced by a lot of designers and developers who work on projects which need to publish on both the media, like magazines, newspapers or books. The comforting fact is that there are some common objectives, the most important being that of communication with the reader. However the differences arise from the fact that the playground is different, the tools and technologies are different and so are some rules. You obey the law of land or get punished!

Resolution

In the print world, you can choose the best resolution for your images and text. The reader sees exactly what you have designed. Not so on the Web! The reader’s screen will dictate the dpi resolution, which is usually lower than the print world. Lower resolution might mean lower quality. If this is not considered during the design, the resulting output, though good on print, might ruin it for the Web reader.

Colours

The inherent colour systems involved the print and Web worlds are completely opposite to each other. The way colours are displayed on the paper is through absorption of certain wavelenghts of light, which is called subtractive model. Whereas the computer screens and monitors emit light and the colours are formed by combination of the colours, called additive model.

This is the reason CMYK colour model is used on print, whereas the RGB colour model is used on screens.

This was one of the early warnings a print designer must heed to. Although there are colour model converters, the designer should test the colours with the intended model.

Typography

This is probably the most affected aspect of design while migrating from paper to pixels. It is not only about selecting the appropriate typefaces, they also have to be renderable by the reader’s computer. Unlike in the print medium, where publishing is same as rendering, if a font is not available on the computer, it is not rendered. That is why a designer should offer a family of fonts which usually includes at least one most common fonts.

The two basic categories of typefaces are Serif and Sans-Serif. Though there is no strong argument against any of them, Serifs have been more popular in the print world and the Sans-Serifs in the Web.

Dynamism and Richness

Web has been more dynamic medium than the print. Not only is the content more frequently updated, the user has various other ways of interacting through the software. A very common example is that readers can comment on articles on the Web. If the comments thread is not accounted for in the design it can make the entire web site unusable.

The interaction now allows the readers to do much more than just read. In addition to participation, they can print the article or email it to someone or bookmark it. If a web site expects its readers to print out articles, then the designer should design for the print medium too.

While designing sites for newspapers, the frequency with which the news is updated and the number of articles that are updated have to be considered for considering how many articles to show and where. Whether full content should be shown or only introductions. All these design decisions stem from the fact that Web is inherently a more dynamic medium.

Not only is it dynamic, but also rich enough to host multimedia content. A web page can contain text, images, movies or all of them together. This means that the designer has to design for more content types as compared to the print. The web designer should be more aware of the different technologies, like Flash.

Standards, Accessibility and Usability

A lot has been said about these already on this site. However, this is something very important that the designer should be aware of. A fantastic design which does not load in a browser is of no value, or rather harmful. The designer can follow the standards to make sure that the web site looks and behaves the same way across multiple browsers and multiple platforms.

In the world of software standards keep evolving as more and more experiments are carried out. The designer needs to keep up with them, e.g., using CSS is a preferred technology for web design.

The rules of readability differ a lot. While on print, black on white is considered golden, it comes in the unreadable category on the Web because of the luminosity.

Performance

This is something that is completely missing in the print world, and this has been the worst aspect for me to convince a print designer about. The concept of a runtime is difficult to explain. In the print world, the content and design is rendered when it is printed. However, in the Web, the different components of the design start getting loaded when the user visits the website. During this time, a web page with heavy components, like big sized images, can take either too long to load or not load at all.

The performance is of higher importance because of the scalability that web publishing possesses. Unlike the physical material, once published on the web, thousands of readers can visit the site. Maybe the designer cannot always account for the overall performance, but he/she should be aware as the design definitely contributes to it.

Epilogue

Print and Web publishing both involve technologies, albeit they are different. Not only are the technologies different, but the freedom that the designers and readers have is also different. In the print world, the designer can choose the specifics whether it is the paper type, the resolution, the colours or the typography. Whereas, on the web, the reader has more freedom with exactly these factors. The reader can use his/her personal preferences to select the tools, the technology, the colour depth or the resolution. The fact that a web design will depend on what the reader uses is something that the web designer has to design for.

The website should not only look the same, but also behave the same across the wide variety of the tools that the reader can use. In general, a print designer has better freedom and control than the web designer. But the web designer has a richer platform for better communication.

There are many more differences in the way the design is implemented. For example, on the Web, background images are preferred as they can provide a good visual effect and load easily. However, I have tried to summarise the fundamental differences, probably each of the aspects deserve their own spaces of discussion. Feel free to add to the list if you find it incomplete.

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