Before the muse let us realise that there are 3 Different terms not to be confused: Print design, web design(WD), and interactive web design(IWD).
E=MC2=IWD
I often find that successful Interactive Web Design (now look I’ve captitalised it) is so complex that it causes deeper, broader, and more complicated thoughts to integrate it than to comprehend the workings of the theory of relativity. It is often confused with print design and web design but in truth, IWD is a lot different; you are creating a universe, you are defining its containment, the laws of its nature, you are implementing it, and where ever you don’t limit your users with natural constraints, you will be called to be judge the intent of their actions. It’s like playing God in a demi-scale, but not sac religiously – It gives you a great respect for him – and you realise why he gave man free choice.
Web design Compared to Print Design
Perhaps the only similarity between print design and WD that your output canvas is rectangular (if you ignore web accessibility mandates) but that’s where the similarities end because in print you know exactly what your end product is going to look like, and you know exactly what medium you are going to impress it on, your paper and your image never changes however the canvas in WD is never the same, it is stretched with the size of the users screen, shrunk with output resolution, and even warped with user preferences, you can’t ever rely on the typeface to be the same across browsers, let alone the colour matching. If one must compare it to print design, imagine designing a print job(one, not many) that must work equally well no matter what you throw into the printer tray: rubber party balloons, socks, paper, glass, and no matter what the colour of media you are printing on; it’s just not do-able, in WD one must design markup, to handle any media type put in the chute, and degrade gracefull. In summary the difference between print design and web design is that in WD you don’t have control of the output, therefore you must code for everything.
Interactive Web Design (IWD) compared to Web Design(WD)
We summarized WD vs print design by saying the difference is that WD must comply to and embrace multiple output methodoligies, however with IWD vs WD, you come into a dilemma upon the realisation that not only you do not know the exact output method, you are now not sure of the content you are outputting, with absolutely every element in your design that is to hold unknown content you will be forced to deal with the question of overflow: weather you are going to shrink it, tabulate it, paginate it, summarize it, hide it, overlap with it, alpha blend it, or a mixture of any of the above, you must have the resources to carry it out.
Aside from content rendering you also have to deal with content input, databases, use extensive algorithms etc…
The five dimensions of web design:
- Real world effect scope
How plugged in the site is to the world, how it effects it, whether the site effects only the light in someones bedroom, weather they can buy a product and have it delivered, or more…
- Information Volume
Volume of information, including, but not limited to how many pages, how many words on each page, external resources, etc…
- Accessibility
Handicap equality, SEO, sitemaps, xml, web services, spiders, syndicability the comprehension scope and gearing(see next post), and internal seekability.
- intrinsic operability.