Designing for web publishing

When moving your design work into a new medium, one of the biggest challenges is learning the ropes of that new medium. This process always involves learning some of the technologies that make that medium tick. You have to kick the tires a bit, and frequently ask, "what if I tried this?"

If you work in the print industry, chances are your design work has been imaged on everything from t-shirts and coffee mugs to high-resolution art books and high profile annual reports. In each case, you needed to take into account the types of media and the needs of your design work to portray it properly. Today, a designers' work may need to be animated across a 50-foot HDTV display in Time Square or printed with varying graphics and text for customized mass mailing. Designers must explore the exciting new possibilities, and pitfalls, of each new technology that is making these design transformations possible.

On the web, there are many wonderful new opportunities for designers, including animation and video, interactive galleries, slideshows, and sound. There are also not-so-wonderful aspects as far as designers are concerned, such as a user's ability to customize the way your website looks. Users can reshape window sizes, change text color, make text larger or smaller, turn images off, and so on.

Fundamentally the web is a tool for gathering information quickly and then finding related information elsewhere. The design, in this case, needs to be flexible enough for these variables, but still tie together the site's branding elements into a cohesive user experience. This article explores some fundamental techniques and technologies used to design for the web.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

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