Why Graphic Design is Not Web Design
People often confuse web design with graphic design and mistakenly think the two are the same. Actually, there is a very big difference in terms of how the work is created. A graphic designer is most familiar with print media design. Magazines, books, brochures, signs and so forth. When they attempt to design a website, they start at the middle of the process which is the design layout with colors and images. Using layers, they are able to simulate navigation buttons that change color on mouseover, etc. Once their work is done, the better graphic designers pass it along to an actual web designer who must try his or her best to translate the design over to the web as best as possible. The process is exactly like someone giving you a magazine cover and saying “make this into a website”. Not the most efficient way of designing a website but most of the time acceptable results are yielded.
Graphic designers with little or no web design skills simply “slice” up their design into smaller photos and export it all into a web page like a jigsaw puzzle. These provide the least favorable results because they are not really website pages. Web pages are made up of HTML code and text, which is what the search engines look for when indexing a website for placement. Although a sliced photo website may look great, to a search engine spider it looks empty and useless, sort of like Paris Hilton. To make matters worse, there are often no title tags, description and/or keyword metatags because the graphic designer is not familiar with HTML coding. If you have a nice looking website but no one seems to be able to find it, make sure it’s not a photo sliced up into a number of pieces and reassembled as a faux web page.
Web designers are trained to work with code first, with images and layout creation taking place later on in the process. Web designers are very similar to contractors building a house. A good web designer starts with research into the proposed content and goals of a site, keywords that will be used to generate traffic and a list of items that should be on the website. After that, a simple wireframe layout (think blueprint) is put together for approval and discussion. Domain names and web hosting are set up, which create a foundation for the project. Images and text are compiled in preparation for the design phase. Once the web design begins, the web designer starts with a code based layout utilizing the basic building blocks such as HTML and CSS. The code structure is now in place and images and graphics are created for placement within the code structure. The use of images is minimized in favor of quick loading CSS code that often accomplishes the same visual results as photos and graphics. Photos are carefully optimized for fast loading time. Page copy is scrutinized for the best choice and frequency of keywords. Meta-tag code is inserted which provides “spider food” for the search engine bots.
Two entirely different processes, right? Does the web design process look a bit more technical and complicated? You bet. That’s why there is such a big (and important) difference.
For a simpler comparison, consider this. If you needed heart surgery which would you select? A general practitioner with a passing interest in heart surgery…or, would you prefer a heart surgery specialist with a background in general medicine?
What does a smart web designer do when he needs print ads, signs, brochures and business cards? He calls a graphic designer and lets them do the work they do best!
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I just started interning at a web design company. In the beginning I totally thought the two were interchangeable. Then one day my boss and one of the designers started talking about skinning a webpage. I had no idea what that meant. When they explained it to me I realized that the coding was done first. Designers for web design companies have to think about how their design will work after the coding process. If the two do not work then the website won’t work at all. This article is a great help for those who don’t understand the difference. Thanks for your help.