Print and Web Design - What Are the Differences and Why It's Important to Design Differently For Web

While working as a web designer, I have many times run across incredibly talented and fine artists who, while doing amazing jobs for print production, tried to design for web with very little knowledge on the technology, computer-human interaction, usability, and other important aspects that distinguish web products from print ones.

I believe that only Web Art Directors should create web project layouts, and this should become a rule. I truly hope that this discipline will soon be taught in colleges. So far we are dealing with User Interface Designers, who are not necessarily Artists. This is why we commonly see nicely looking websites that are not usable or very usable products that do not look nice. The situation has been improving lately, but lots of websites are still being designed by print designers. And I don't think this is coming to an end any time soon.

There is a major difference between designing for print and for the web. Print materials could be carried around and read by your target audience at their convenient time. When designing for the web, you need to keep in mind that your target audience first comes to your website and then reads the contents. Another difference is that print material could be carefully read from paper. That's much more convenient and comfortable versus reading from the screen.

Design of a print product page is fully visible right away, and the design concept can be captured by a human mind at once. Web design elements appear to website users one by one as they are viewing the site. Depending on several variables such as the amount of content, internet connection speed, screen size and resolution, etc, sometimes even important content elements may not be visible right away.

Another concept critical to designing products is cognitive load. It refers to the load on working memory during thinking. The more a person has to learn in a shorter period of time, the more difficult it is to process that information in working memory. Cognitive load is even more important for interactive products than for print product. When it comes to printed material, a user spends some time looking for important information. However, users spend much less time when trying to find particular information on a web page.

Readers visually scan print products in order to find the information they are looking for. Users read websites using a hand when moving a mouse from an object to object. The lag between the sight reaction and a hand movement is directly related to the cognitive load of the project: the longer it takes a user to find the information he wants, the heavier the cognitive load. It is easy to see that cognitive load is inversely related to the usability of your project. That is, the longer it takes a user to find what he is looking for, the higher the chance that he either forgets what he was doing or leaves the website.

Therefore, even nice and clean designs, which work well for print products may not be considered usable for web products. This is why it's very important to approach the creation of a website knowing the important concepts of cognitive load, human-computer interaction, usability, etc. Print design prioritizes good looks. Web design must emphasize the content.