Web Design Can Learn a Lot from Print.
Posted on June 17th, 2008 by Steve
It seems a lot of web designers these day are trend following. The great glossy logo with the the reflective drop shadow, the saturated colors, the large beveled button, the ever omnipresent drop shadows and the same overused content layout patterns that mimic most blogs out there. It’s all fine and well but I think a lot of new media designers never even laid out a brochure or flowed text into a magazine article. How often did they experiment with type as they’ve been confined in a browser that wants system fonts for the default of the body copy.
With traditional print your open to a totally new set of creative possibilities and new types of boundaries so It’s unfortunate they miss some of these great learning experiences about content layout and page flow that could help them increase their web design skills. Really isn’t that the purpose of web? Content presentation and providing information? So when designers get so focused in on making big flashy graphics and ignoring text and how it reads within the page, they’re doing their readers and themselves a disservice. Magazine layouts and brochures are a great resources to get inspiration for line height and weight and unique layouts within an organizational grid. They show us from decades of the industries’ evolution how to effectively make copy readable and impactful. Ever create a 3 column text layout with a quote callout within the body copy? It’s done in magazines all the time but you don’t see it too often in a webpage. Most of the time a webpage’s subpage copy is just a pasting of a word document with some paragraph breaks thrown in. With the power of CSS we are given much more control of the type than we used to and we need to take advantage of it.
We as web designers need to take special attention and care to the text and how we present content and help engage the reader. Save that beveled gradient button for another day. Check out some of these great examples of content presentation in some brochure samples over at Smashing Magazine.
click on any of these images to see some more.
