Dairy of a Madman

Put simply: print designer != web designer.

In fact, I think that web design — good, quality, adhering to standards web design — is perhaps the most unique and most difficult of all the visual arts, because you are designing for a dynamic medium. Print (and any other media) offer static display methods; the web does not. Screen resolution, browsers, operating systems… All of these are variables that you have to take into account at the earliest stages of design work.

Print designers do not need to be delving into web design and proclaiming themselves King or Queen of the realm without spending some serious time forgetting much of what they know.

Learning some web architecture wouldn’t hurt about 95% of the people that I know that call themselves web designers. Seriously. Google it, and spend a week boning up on the basics.

Am I a web designer? A little, but only as much as I can encompass in the broader title of web developer. My By-Day title is Web User Interface Engineer — I’m not designing as much as I am implementing other people’s work, and that, as you might guess, is the source of this little rant. I may not be able to create the next masterwork of the web, but I can sure as hell tell you what works and what doesn’t. My poor coworkers will attest to that.

Oh, and “designers”: please, for the love of god, stop showing off. It impresses very few people, and fewer still if they’re viewing on a computer other than your own.

I’ve got to relearn how not to give a shit about these things…