Ink-stained designers: Don't write off new media

This is Issue 2 of The Sensible Internet Design Letter.

I designed a lot of newspaper pages in the 1980s and '90s, even after making the jump to Internet site management in 1995.

Recently, a good friend and design colleague from that time finally made the jump himself -- right back into print newspaper design. In recent years he had managed digital creatives doing everything from HTML template architectures to Macromedia Director movies. He and his teams won awards and respect, all deserved, while bringing new-media flair to old-media content in a friendly workplace.

Why give that up? For one thing, his new job is fantastic: a bigger department, more resources and a broader spectrum of design opportunities at a growing paper in a vibrant market.

Something else may have been in play, though. He wouldn't come out and say it, but I believe he felt those few years of interactive design had dulled his creative edge. And that same feeling appears to be creeping up on other print-based designers who tried their hands at new media.

Roger Black and Mario Garcia, perhaps the best known designers and redesigners of print periodicals, both wrote books on the subject of Web design in 1997. Black wrote another (with usability specialist Steve Krug) in 2000. And both gurus' design houses took on challenging, high-profile Web creative projects during those heady years.

Today, their consultancy sites still say they'll take Web jobs. But their high-profile projects these days are ink-on-paper: in Black's case, slick custom-published magazines; in Garcia's, the recent and much-needed Wall Street Journal redesign.

Maybe they're just following the revenue streams, and who could blame them? The client rosters of many a Web design shop cratered in the dot-com bust and subsequent U.S. recession -- if the shops survived at all. Venture capital money no longer energizes corporate Internet initiatives, especially not in creative services. Meanwhile, these guys are good enough that they're always in demand for print projects.

Or maybe it's that and something more. Maybe they burned out on all the Web hype. Maybe it's just a nagging desire to do work that's most meaningful, in a comfortable design metaphor that appeals most directly to their creative senses.

Can't argue with that. It would be a shame, though, if designers began to believe the Internet holds much less creative opportunity than print.

Some print designers say the Web is simply a homogeneous, small-canvas, low-resolution playground for database administrators and Perl jockeys. Others hate the idea of designing for the least common denominator of browser capabilities, operating environments and portable device interfaces. Still others say the Web usability movement forces harsh standards that kill creativity.

But many of those complainants have never worked in Web design; they make their observations from the outside looking in. They are not likely to invest their careers in new media design anyway. The real risk for Internet managers is losing current designers back to old media.

I think that's also a risk for the designers. It's too soon for digital creatives to give up on the Internet.

Yes, some Web sites are visual vacuums. But as many print publications are, too. It's easy to find examples of dull typography, rushed layouts and unsophisticated imagery on paper. And more than a few print designers have turned features section fronts or magazine spreads into personal sandboxes -- designing for themselves, not for readers.

From my print days, I remember far too many instances of institutionalized "design by guessing": building pages based on editors' assumptions of how to communicate with readers, instead of testing those assumptions with readers and acting on the results. We had little if any specific user-test data, or even locally focused market research, to support our decisions. That's still a common complaint among designers, by the way.

Internet design specialists may not get opportunities to do poster-size illustrations, but they could show the print world a thing or two about audience-focused creative cycles: research, design, test, adjust, deploy, repeat.

Print or Web, it's still information design. Let's just acknowledge that the two forms require only slightly different flavors of creativity, which in turn inspire different flavors of people.

To illustrate this point in presentations, I sometimes show a linear scale called "The Range of Design Specialties." The left side represents extremes of art and emotion; the right side, extremes of science and empiricism; the midpoint, the craft of information design.

Abstract painters and illustrators go closest to the left edge, and programmers and system testers closest to the right edge. Print designers are a tick to the left of the midpoint, and Web designers just slightly to the right.

Though they all do design work of a kind, residents on either edge usually are not good candidates for information design specialties. They are creative purists who would struggle to compromise either art or science in the name of mass communications. Information designers ride the middle of the seesaw, able to strike that balance.

So where is the creativity in Web design? It's in the brainstorming and decisionmaking that leads to intelligent compromises, and the problem-solving required to execute on them. Funny thing is, that's where you find the creativity in print design, too.