Print to Web: A Rough Ride

I have worked with several print designers whose clients happened to want a web presence, so they hired me to translate their designs into functional sites. They are all awesome people, but working with them has often been a rough ride with a a few disconnects. That’s because the web and a piece of paper are drastically different things (duh!). Here are some examples:

• Print designers like pretty fonts. “What do you mean I can choose Arial or Verdana? Why can’t I use Zabolofsky Sans Serif Bold?” Web fonts are a pretty foreign concept and they will pressure you to make text images using their pretty fonts. Resist.
• Print designers think a monitor is fixed-size, like a book. “So do I make this 800×600 or what?” This will give you trouble beyond launch. Because print materials do not change after printing, print designers think only of how the page will look when it launches. They often do not plan for expanding pages to accommodate more content.
• Print designers don’t get web usability. Print material usability is pretty simple. Pick up; read; turn page. The web has hundreds of implicit usability rules, such as: logo links to homepage, scroll bars are best left undecorated and at the rightmost side of the screen, fonts are best when big and ugly etc etc. Prepare to explain all these points to your designer client.
• Print designers use wacky print terminology that will confuse you, e.g. “Can you change the gutter and leading on this text?” Huh?
• Print designers don’t get programming. A print designer is an artist; a web developer is an engineer. For a good artist, the hardest part of the process is catching the creative spark that makes things look great; implementation is fairly easy. For an engineer it is quite the reverse. A print designer may not get, for instance, why it takes you two days to code an entire site and then three weeks to figure out why this goddamned rollover isn’t quite right, or even worse, why a form that looks ok still doesn’t work okay.
• Form over function. Designers have tended to be quite apathetic to one or more of the following: whether the user flow makes sense; whether users will read all of the copy; whether the products will sell; whether the site is even a good idea to begin with. Understandably, they do care about whether it is pretty. This makes a ton of sense in the print world, where people do judge and buy a book by its cover. But in the web world, where the most popular sites such as Ebay and Amazon are also the ugliest, it just doesn’t fly.