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Sitting in a warehouse-converted-into-an-office in a Hermin Miller chair at an Ikea desk is a Web Designer who reports to a Vice-President of Marketing for the latest Internet Startup Dot Com. Perhaps he’s sporting round-rimmed spectacles and a goatee, or perhaps she’s donning Banana Republic leather pants and a pierced nose. Our designer has recently migrated to the Web from a print production house. Moving from PageMaker or Quark over to GoLive or FrontPage was relatively easy, and PhotoShop is still the staple image editing tool. The migration was rather simple. It’s still just graphic design and page layout after all, only with the Web you can skip the whole printing ink to paper process and just FTP your work to a server somewhere. Presto, you’re done.
There are three problems with the previous scenario, which I will elaborate on. First, Web designers do not belong in a Marketing department. Second, the migration from other mediums to the Web, eased with WYSIWYG applications for the techically apprehensive, hides the true nature of the Web from the designer. Third, the process of going from Photoshop to online delivery is oversimplified, and thus the objectives of graphic design for the web beginning with the image editing application are misguided.
As is often the case with internet start-up companies and Web design firms, the designers find themselves on the org chart under the Marketing department. This makes sense, proponents argue, because the graphic design of the Web sites is inexorably tied to the marketing of that site. One could go so far as to say that the graphic design IS the primary marketing of the site. However, this argument is flawed for one irrefutable reason: the design of Web sites is a creative endeavour seated in programming. While the graphics for a site are created in an image-editing application such Photoshop, as are often the visual ideas for the overall design layout, the actual execution of the design occurs in the HTML code.
Comparing the Web to print, the HTML code is like the Pantone ink, and the browser is like the paper stock. Without intimate knowledge of these key elements, the end result will always remain in question. Professional print artists are intimately knowledgeable about the various inks, Pantone color matching, coated versus non-coated paper, spot color and CMYK. This knowledge is vital to the artist, because their artistry can only be achieved through the cunning control of their medium. Similarly, the Web designer must have intimate knowledge of their medium in order to achieve artistry with it, and the true nature of the Web medium lies with the HTML code, as well as the interpretation of that code by the client’s browser. Thus, the art of Web design is an art of coding.
This brings us back to the Web designer in the Marketing department. While the design of the Web site is certainly of profound interest to the Marketing interests of the site, Web design is interwoven with Web programming. The enterprise of the professional Web designer, designing interchangeably with Photoshop and HTML coding, as well as JavaScript, StyleSheets, DHTML, etcetera is very similar to the enterprise of the Web programmer coding Perl CGI, C, and Java. They are both practicing an art of coding. The designer is coding for visual layout design and interactivity, and the programmer is coding for form, database, and application functionality. Having a designer or programmer under Marketing management makes just as much sense as having a Marketer under Technology management. Inevitably Marketing management will be put in the position of making managerial decisions that lack a basic understanding of Web design, and many Marketing people from other industries are resistant to the idea that Web design is based in coding. It’s a fundamental clash of MBA’s versus Geeks.
Now the second problem I mentioned earlier was the ease with which designers can move from other mediums, such as print, to the Web with the help of WYSIWYG applications. WYSIWYG applications are designed to look familiar to the non-Web designer. They are designed to look like non-Web applications by Adobe or Quark or Microsoft, and to hide the code from the designer’s eyes so that they aren’t frightened by it. This is due to the fact that there has been a traditional split between designers and programmers. Designers don’t do programming because they are too creative, and programming requires a mathematical mind. Likewise programmers don’t do design, because they’re propellor-heads and techno-geeks who lack the creative spirit. These perceptions are wrong and should be repudiated.
For the Web designer to reject HTML coding is to reject the essence of the medium. HTML is a simple language that any artist can learn, and to become a true Web artist they must learn. The WYSIWYG applications create an illusion that the Web is a medium like print. In fact, the Web is a medium of code and browsers, of packets and bandwidth. Graphic design for the Web is primarily concerned with making images as small and light as possible, which is the opposite of the concerns for print. The Web is also a medium whose canvas is organized by tables, cartesian grids slicing up images and text into table cells that form the layout design.
Designers are constantly encouraged to “think outside the box.” However, I would encourage designers to THINK INSIDE THE GRID. While Web designs do not have to show the grid, although they certainly can, they must use the grid both in their concept as well as their execution. WYSIWYG applications do not encourage this type of thinking. That is why it is so important to do Web design by hand, which means to code HTML by hand. Only by writing HTML code by hand can the designer feel the true nature of the Web medium, and thereby learn to think about the design from the perspective of the code and the co-construction of the design with the browser. When you visuallze colors mixing with table tags, when you can dream in HTML, only then are you a Web artist.
The third problem with our Web designer scenario is the over-simplified process of going from design to delivery. From Photoshop to the World Wide Web. When designing for print, the essence is quality. File sizes are only limited by your storage medium. In general, the larger the file size, the better. However, the Web is exactly the opposite of this. The objective of graphic design for the Web is to squeeze the graphics as small as possible while still retaining a marginally acceptable level of quality. Pouring over the color pallete of a GIF to shave off as many colors as possible, reducing the amount of anti-aliasing to the bare minimum, dissecting every pixel in order to eliminate every non-essential byte of information has become truly an art form. New applications such as Photoshop 5.5 have made this task much easier, but it still requires an austere approach to graphic design in order to use these tools to their fullest potential.
However, the Web designer should also be constantly thinking about the creative integration of graphics with embedded HTML elements. These can include colored table cells, table borders, background colors, and horizontal and verticle rule lines. Since these embedded elements are defined in the HTML code and rendered by the client’s browser, download time is virtually non-existent compared to GIF’s and JPEG’s. Once designers embrace the creative possibilities of these embedded elements, their approach to Web design can begin to change to incorporate them. Creative limitations always lead to creative solutions, and a spartan approach to Web design will lead to an aesthetic that can include rich artistic experiences without heavy graphics and long waiting times for the viewer.
All of this has to do with the process by which the Web designer approaches the medium. They must embrace the medium. They must sully their hands with HTML code. They must learn to think inside the grid and see the Cartesian grid not as a prison but as a canvas that can be utilized and creatively transcended. The Web designer must be intimate with the inner workings of the GIF and JPEG, and learn to take an austere approach to graphic design. And returning to our first point, the Web designer should be seen as both an artist and a programmer. As such they should be included in the realm of Web development, and not confined by the non-technical concerns of Marketing where they will be doomed to muck about in non-Web-like thinking.
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