I love great design. Everything from furniture and architecture to clothing and signage. My background is design/ art direction for print. Some people say print is limited and digital is a limitless medium. I disagree hugely. They both have their respective potentials and hinderences. With print you are limited by colours, size, substrate to name the biggies. But print is print. Once you drop ink on paper or plastic, it stays there. When I look at something printed and give it to someone else to look at, it looks the same. If i print something in PMS 072 (reflex blue for all you keener) it basically looks the same when printed anywhere in the world. That’s th beauty of the Pantone colour matching system.
Ah, but let’s chat about this “unlimited potential” medium called digital, specifially websites. I just reviewed some creative a friend sent me for an upcoming high end eye glasses site. The creative was gorgeous. Probably very similar to the print creative (as great digital work tends to be, connected to the offline work, regardless what is driving the look). Then I took the lessons I have learned in the last four years of serious design for web and ripped it apart. “how will this look in ie6?, on a 1024×768 monitor with all standard browser elements accounted for? (scroll bars, top nab, bottom nav, etc actually bring the usable size without triggering ugly ass scroll bars to about 972×550px)
How about the fact that it loads in a new window? How are you planning on google finding the site and rating it. While the product shots were pretty, how can I send someone this page to look at specifically when the URL never changes?
The demographic that they were targeting are high income young men. Men who like toys and have iPhones and blackberry’s. So the page with the pretty flash based map is just that, pretty, but what am I supposed to do with that if I am waking downtown Montreal and know this company has a store and I can’t get a google map link?i will go somewhere else.
It are these questions that can crush the fragile designer ego after they have sweat and bled over a layout or concept.
Once I discovered the joys of wireframe and proper site maps, all the ugly questions were asked and I could work around them. It is only really frustrating when you have to do this after the fact. It became very much like a great creative brief for print where everything was spelled out. Make it this big, 3 colours, 12 pt Cornwall, two languages, perf line here, blah blah, blah.
Then there is the issue of compatibility. With print you design for one substrate at a time. You have the litho version or the flexo version, etc. But one at a time. Web design is the equivalent of printing on paper and steel and cardboard and a foggy mirror at the same bloody time. You have conversations like, “well, that will work in ie7, but not 6 or 8, maybe in chrome, but not firefox, but mostly in opera, ooh, but not the new version they are releasing at 3pm today….”. How the f**k does one stay creative after that line?
It really involves understanding who I looking at the site (beyond the client who writes the cheques who for whatever reason refuses to use anything other than ie5). This will rule out certain browser concerns and user bandwidth challenges. – we have had a client who’s user base was in a very rural part of the country so streaming video and heavy flash work was out.
It’s scary out there, I know. But if we ask the right questions ahead of time, we won’t kill the project managers in the process.
Good luck
Cheers
Chris Gostling, RGD
Creative Director :: bbm
Filed under: BBM
