"Damn, why it's so hard to design a website!" That's what my friend said two months ago, when he was trying to design his studio's website.
He's a logo guy, packaging guy and branding guru; he can imagine and sketch all the things in this world beautifully with great speed (from high detailed robots, monsters, flowers, super heroes, to Lord of the Rings guys). But! When it comes to website design, he is slow and the result is awkward and odd. Holy moly!
Why? Why on earth this could happened to him? Why it's so hard to do this 72 dpi thing with only couple of boxes, gradient and a bit of color scheme that is surely be a drop dead easy case to graphic designer degree guy like him?
On the other side; me a computer science guy who can't barely sketch a living thing, zero color / art theory knowledge is running a web design studio. How ironic.
One thing for sure that website design is not a graphic design. Web design isn't all about beautiful and artistic, but it should be fun and convenient to use. It also has several key points that don't apply to other graphic design fields.
Art
Relates to something beautiful, a certain feel for the visitor. In website world, UI (user interface) design is usually having a big part in the art.
Technology
Not only for the eyes, the artistic side of the website should be adapted very well to the technology.
For example: to keep the loading time short, the background image is strategically patterned so that it's still beautiful (even though it's a repeated image).
Usability
When the tango dance between the art and technology reached the stunning level, the website still fails if it's not easy to use and don't have any guessable elements.
For example: The navigation is difficult to find and the location is moving from one page to another, the result is: confused audience.
Information Presentation
Reading on the screen media is different from reading newspaper / magazine. The web visitor is scanning (not reading) the content with the big letter "F" pattern. So that they need several cue points to guide their fast information scanning process.
-
By the way, my friend's other quotes to "Damn, why it's so hard to design a website!" are:
- You have 1024 width canvas, and I don't have any size.
- CMYK runs in my blood, I can't have an affair with RGB.
- It's so weird to have a 72 dpi while I do 300 dpi in my whole life.
Currently, this blog is maintained by 
I think I know the guy who said that?
anyway pretty darn good explanation you made to differentiate those web artist and graphic artist.
Just want to share the same (kinda) rant.
Icon design is not a logo design, a person ask me to do an icon design for his website. And after a bit of chit chat, he told me that the icon will be placed in the header. He said, i will make the text by my self, and you do the icon.
I gave him logo price not the icon price tag, which is way lower than logo design. He is a bit confused about why an icon can not be used as logo.
Logo is a logo, icon is an icon. Afterall he was offered icon project not logo project, so the project result must be used as icon, not as LOGO.
Icon design is not logo design.. period
Do you have a signed agreement for that? (for icon only, not logo).
And if that guy really use it for icon, than he must be very desperate.
PS. Did you mean "I gave him icon price not the logo price tag" in:
"I gave him logo price not the icon price tag, which is way lower than logo design. He is a bit confused about why an icon can not be used as logo."
?
Nice article, i agree completely on this.
Don't really know why most of the time clients generalize designers..
That's why client education is required if we deal with such client.
Everyone wants to be designers :) Without knowing what to do ...
Umumnya, banyak yg lemah di Usability & Information Delivery.
PS: UI harus masuk Usability, bukan Art.
Thanks for the advice sir Ivan.
yea i agree with you mate. but the most difficult designs are printing and clothing design. because what you see on the screen is sometimes not what you get in real life, in this case designs on paper and cotton.. and when the things are quite different in final result it will be a pain in the ass to do all over again and the clothing production really takes times. such as making the film and using real paint and mix the cmyk paint manually to get the colors you want based on screen.
I never knew it's such a PITA job. What you see is not what you get, omg!
But luckily we have you, expert in the clothing business.
you know. i never said im an expert in clothing design. what im trying to point here is that it's very lucky for web designers because the final result is being delivered to users on the computer screen.
but luckily we clothing designers don't need to code the css and crap though. lol. each to its own difficulty. but we're talking web design here, not web development. the case will be entirely different case if this article is referencing to a fully complete web development. (css, php, javascript etc).
Well you are expert! lol.
I'm totally agree with you, there is no "your job field is easier than mine", in fact that every job field has its own benefits and problems compared to others.
It's our job to be professional and understand our own strength and weakness. Optimize everything, every moment, every day.
Nice blog, fec.
i'm agree with you.
Btw, web designer <> graphic designer. Many of our client don't know the different. Sometimes they underestimate web design aspect and totally give the job to the graphic designer who don't understand web design aspect at all.
And in the worst case, maybe we often meet arrogant graphic designer who think they have good qualify in design don't care much about web technology, usability and rules.
Sometime we have to play discriminative to the new clients. We have to choose wisely and brave enough to say no to them.
that usability issue is interesting topic :)
all of you are (web, graphic) designers with a lot of imagination..
for the web designers, should you use the web standards + usability + accessibility rules with the client?
Amen! I'm so glad to know that others feel the same way. I'm a graphic designer struggling to learn web design. It's (literally) a different language! I'm always on the lookout for Print-to-Web resources. Thanks for the article!
Greate one. In some way it reminds me on the article developer != designer
Aleni: I agree, print design is far more difficult: it must take a lot of time and experience to learn how what you see on the screen is going to change when it's printed, then there's things like separations to worry about - gives me a headache just thinking about it.
On the other hand, once it's done, it looks the same to everyone. Us web designers have to deal with the fact that no two monitors show your site the same way, plus cross browser issues... This is something it's hard to get clients to understand.
Post new comment