Designing of Print VS Designing of Online

A good print designer doesn't make him a good web designer because they often tend to make one mistake: using print layouts and print marketing strategies to design and market a website. Print designer often makes the art / layout design as their priority. Hardware and software are not the main consideration during the printing. However, spacing is. On the other hand, wed designer makes the content and navigation to their priority. Effective web site is to allow visitors access the information they want in the easiest way.

In order to avoid these happen, the organization and designer must learn to identify some common problems:

Readability
Reading paper is much easier than from screen due to certain conditions such as lighting, brightness of the monitor etc, it is no good to stare at monitor for long period. For a reason, designer is advised to use more conservative fonts because it will be replaced with substitute font if certain individual computer may not have installed the same font. Larger text also makes it more readable. Paragraph and line spacing is crucial to create white space (Parker 2003).

Navigation
Print is often printed in portrait so readers can hold it easily while web page is in landscape. This is to allow important information can be showed on the monitor, reducing the needs of vertical scrolling and from top to bottom.

Colors
The advantage of color on web is that it is very cheap. Designer can produces and shows million of color possibilities on screen. The fact is that a PC can only shows 216 types of web-safe-color, like the text selection. The result also may not be produced exactly the same as seen on screen due to various materials / qualities o paper.

Interactivity
Main difference between print and online design is the level of interactivity involved. Print can be only flipped front and back. Web site allows visitors choosing content and links they want which involves greater level of interactivity of the multimedia, such as video, audio etc. These elements are important as visitor can access to information they want without need to read all the texts (Kress 1997).

Of course, the above mentioned problems doesn't refer to print designer cannot be a good web designer, as long as the designer has a clear mind about the different between print and online design.


Article Source: (1) Print Design vs Web Design - Part 1
                         (2) Print Design vs Web Design - Part 2
                         (3) Differences Between Print Design and Web Design

Reference:
Kress, G 1997, ‘Visual and verbal modes of representation in electronically mediated communication: the potentials of new forms of text’ in Snyder, Ilana (ed) 1997, Page to screen: taking literacy into the electronic era, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, Chapter 3, pp. 53-79.

Parker, RC 2003, ‘Designing documents for web distribution’, Looking good in print, 5th edn, Paraglyph Press, Scottsdale AZ, Chapter 14, pp. 269-293.