Newsdesigner.com | Khoi Vinh on Print vs. Online Design

Khoi Vinh on Print vs. Online Design

7:15 AM, August 17, 2007

Khoi Vinh, design director of nytimes.com (and SND Boston speaker) has a brilliant post that distills a lot of the thoughts about print designers and the web that have been banging around my skull for months. It's a must-read.

The prerequisite for doing something meaningful with any of these skills — HTML, CSS, Flash or whatever — is first embracing the medium as something different from print. Indeed, there's no point in learning these skills unless as a print designer you've made a prior shift in your understanding of how design works in digital media. Specifically, come to grips with the fact that, on the Web, design is not a method for implementing narrative, as it is in print, but rather it's a method for making behaviors possible.
More often than not, the reflexive approach that I've seen print designers take on the Web is to treat it as a vehicle for print-based design practices: fixing type sizes, specifying typefaces, ignoring usability and expediency, and perhaps most notoriously making the assumption that, over time, users will come around to a print-focused way of consuming content.

In my experience, none of those tactics work. Their all-around ill-suitedness tends to boil over to frustration when print designers realize that, by and large, there's little room for visual virtuosity online. Which is to say, the Web is not commonly an effective tool for highly expressive displays of typographic, photographic or illustrative skill. Looking for opportunities to execute the sort of improvisational and dramatic creative visions that we see in printed periodicals, for instance, is likely to be an exercise in disappointment.

I suspect this may be a bit of a preview of his SND Boston session "Print Vs. Online Design: Can a print designer find happiness online? Can a web designer learn from print?"

>This Way to the Web, Print Designers! [Subtraction.com]

Comments

Heads up: After you hit "post" things may be slow and you may get an error. Most likely, your comment did post. Apologies. I'm looking for a fix.

The link to TFA is busted, at least on Firfox for mac. http://www.subtraction.com/archives/2007/0816_this_way_to_.php

Posted by: Ken H. at August 17, 2007 9:02 AM

Whoops! Got a little overzealous with the HTML entity encoding. Fixed now!

Posted by: Mark at August 17, 2007 9:15 AM

I can't tell you how many times I had heard really talented print designers talk about their Web designs in terms of the typography they chose.

Web design and graphic design are almost two completely different realms.

The iPhone is wonderfully designed for digital media, the iPhone is the new high water mark for user-centered design, and (get this) the iPhone uses Helvetica - brilliantly.

Posted by: Robb Montgomery at August 17, 2007 11:36 AM

One's first step in wisdom is to kuesteon everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.

Posted by: Peyton Clough at August 21, 2007 11:31 AM

Bloggers vs. journalists
Newspaper video vs. TV video
Point and shoot vs. high-end video
Web designers vs. print designers
RSS feeds vs. designers

Can't we all just get along?

Posted by: Brian Cubbison at August 21, 2007 8:38 PM

I am a student in Va. majoring in production technology media studies. Print and online are two separate entities but with similar basics(I feel). I work for the school newspaper, The Tartan, but plan on pursuing web based production upon graduation.
As Khoi Vinh said "... is first embracing the medium as something different from print."

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