Web designers working alongside print designers

Hi. Good site.

@Macwebdiva I certainly agree, education is the only way we are ever going to change this approach.

I've also done several blogs about this. I am a designer who codes. I design but the past few years since I love CSS, I code the page from someone else's design more often.

Print designers who design for the web do the stupidest tings for sure. Like designing a page that can't be put together well, and my biggest complaint, using some weird font at 80% tracking and 9.2 pt in some pod that can't be resized easily.

I doubt many designers will read your blog as coders, so this is indeed frustrating.

For me, it's been taking that print designer and showing them how I slice up their page and use some images for background images and others inside a div. I show them how the page looks in Dreamweaver, BBEdit, or whatever. They MUST see the code! or they'll never get it.

So the problem isn't that a designer is incapable of doing what we are asking. Just ignorant. The big problem is we are often cut out of the design loop with the client until it's time for us to make the page function. If we then say anything, it's the "This was approved by the client, why am I just now finding out about this". (Direct quote from a few years back)

As I see it, somehow we need to get in from the beginning and explain why certain things need to be done certain ways. Make a standards document, which includes things like usability. Where search buttons should go, and other things the end user expects.

Then make a checklist for the designer so they know what is expected of them as far as we are concerned. I want layers named and organized from Photoshop, but would prefer they use Fireworks for example. Done in pages.

I design everything in Fireworks myself. It makes going from a wireframe for general positioning so the client can see the page from the beginning. It also involves the clients being educated a bit too.

Bottom line, instead of us complaining, lets band together and do something about it. Make our standards documents available on our sites so others can take them, alter to their companies needs and pass it forward. Lets get the Sales reps and the designers and us in the same rooms and discuss how a site should be done. Explaining how smoother the workflow will be i we are all in constant communication, instead of bringing us in from the dark basement in the end.

We are the ONLY ones with this knowledge. It is up to US to do something about it. Change the way the company works through a site. Speak up and change things and stop complaining. Only we can change how print designers make websites. We are the problem, since no one is telling the print designer any different. Only we can turn this around in our favor! DO IT!

Andrew,

so how does it work for me: a trained typographer, turned qualified graphic designer, worked as an actual printer, experienced product and packaging designer, has-been forced pixel-perfect by a web developer, who now wishes me to make web 2.0 ish, flowing designs and in the same breathe suggests I to learn html and css? WTF. If I wanted to learn html and css inside-out, I would be a developer.

I guess I am termed a print designer, because I like the smell of ink, and I don't cream myself over a 32" LCD screen? Ok, I agree with the post, print designers working alongside web designers is Teeth-grindingly annoying. :)

Can't say I didn't expect that response. I think the most important things to consider as a design coming from a pixel perfect background is being asked to design things that line up and conform to a grid is no different to any other design job, but believing that the canvas your design is implemented on will remain as 780*556 just won't happen.

Every single visitor is arriving with different screen sizes, different browser preferences, different browsers and different operating systems, not to mention different colour schemes on their monitors. Unlike designing a DLE which remains a DLE, is printed to your Pantone specifications, you can't expect that level of control over a medium that is designed to offer choice.

In trying to exercise that control over the medium you break accessibility, which traditionally might not be a concern for a print based designers (you are rarely asked to make sure the Nike catalogue can also be reproduced in braille or read by a screen reader), but that is the nature of the web, and more often that not people are being asked to ensure that their sites are accessible to minorities.

I think that any designer involved in web should have a mid-level or better understanding of HTML and CSS, these are the tools used to bring your creations to life, and also the tools that provide limitations to what you can and can't do. As a print designer you understand inks, press requirements, the absorption rate of thicker card etc etc, it's a requirement of your job.

Teeth-grindingly annoying, absolutely.