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By: Erik Vlietinck
Tue, April 22, 2008 - 9:34:00

Print, we’ve only talked about print. But cross-media publishing increasingly requires designers to create web design and mobile design as well. And a growing number of graphic and layout designers who have been focussing on print output only, are now also tackling the online design market. They are forced to do so by the economic climate and out of a growing awareness that printed design these days must have a parallel online component.

The reason why designers don’t meet with the same complaints in web output as in print output is because the web is nowhere near standards yet. Despite the W3C and its many efforts to have all web designers use CSS, there are still people out there who create web sites using tables. 

Despite Microsoft shouting it has a standard-based web browser, most CSS designers know they’ll have to tweak their design for proper display in Internet Explorer 6 and 7 --and probably 8 as well.

Web design is more haphazard than printed design. It costs less than print, and when a page only loads in browser X but not in browser Y, you can always tell people to get lost or buy browser X. In one word: web design and web publishing at large, are less professionalised than printed output, which means you can get away with more. The reason obviously is that many web sites are still being created by laymen, bloggers and people who don’t care about how something looks at all (not mentioning the content).

To print designers who migrate to web design --or who take on web design as one element of their offering-- the unprofessional nature of web design can be a blessing; they don’t feel the pressure to learn about good online design as they would to learn about print design. Nobody will complain when the web site they have designed is not viewable in all available browsers, because they can rightly claim W3C-standard compliance and still not have a web page that shows in all browsers.

Colour management on the web is virtually non-existent --sRGB will do just fine. The problems crop up when the design has to be wrapped around a Content Management System. When that moment arrives, most “hybrid” designers will have to hand off the web design to a team of specialised web designers who are more versed into the technical issues than they are.

Care About the Looks of Your Design

So, what must you know as a designer in the 21st Century? I believe you definitely should know or at least care more about the output processes than most designers currently do. In a cross-media publishing world, however, it simply isn’t possible to know all about all output media and channels. If that would be required, you should know all about video production, audio editing, graphics, colour management for still and motion pictures, and a lot more. Your head would spin, and your creative juices would stop flowing.

The bottom-line therefore in my opinion is that specialists won’t disappear any time soon. On the contrary, if the Web keeps growing and professionalising, the demand for specialised designers and video / audio producers will grow as well. As far as I can see, print designers won’t disappear either. Print will not disappear, not even when we can read our newspaper on a flexible colour-LCD screen. But I do think print designers will have to become more proficient at the output process they’re working with.

At least, if they care enough about how their creations will look when published.

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