Design Presentation — Style vs. Accuracy
Why would you print out a design that will ultimately be on a screen? Website users are not running monitors that display 300 dpi at 11 x 17. That would be one impressive screen.
But if you were to make a layout of a page true to the look of the end user’s monitor screen, you leave yourself open for an attack on your designs. I had a client recently tell me that a design I did looked very unprofessional and ‘childish’ because I chose not to anti-alias the type in photoshop. I wanted to give a closer representation to how the end user would be seeing the site. That did not strike any kind of positive chord with the client.
I suppose sometimes trying to look beyond the moment your in can make you loose focus on what the client is really seeing. Looks like next time I present a design, I’ll be making sure all type is anti-aliased. Wait, so what happens when you break out the design into actual HTML and the text now isn’t anti-aliased in the browser? Sometimes the client understands that HTML text renders that way, sometimes the client just needs a little explination, sometimes they start to think you can’t make your design into a website that looks EXACTLY like the design in turn trying to hire more consultants to dip into the conversations between you and the client and triple the time needed to complete to project and your chance for a profit goes into the negative zone…but that would be a pessimist view of all of this. (^_^)
So what about everyone else Are you more concerned with putting a pristine design together, 11×17 300 dpi printable with crisp print quality images? Or being able to show how true HTML text will be rendered and design around 1024×768 72 dpi layouts, which are not always the nicest to look at when printed out, though you don’t look at a website on a piece of paper in the end, it’s on a screen.
August 17th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
Thanks for stepping in and posting this Chris.
My opinion is the design print out should be as good a quality as possible - It is a presentation after all.
Inconsistencies with the rendering can be addressed in subsequent meetings, where you can explain them easily, accompanied by screen-shots in a PDF.
August 18th, 2008 at 9:22 am
I understand your frustration with the anecdote you’d described - and while I haven’t had quite the same experience, I have had one that’s similar and also befuddled me. We were working on a new site for a client - very minimal stuff, as they were not very tech savvy - and to relay some edits, they literally printed out every page and then commented on the way the information looked on the printed page. Not that bad you say? Here’s the kicker - they were making design comments on what was essentially (at this point) the print style sheet! Stuff like “This header is redundant,” (it was the Title Tag and the H1), or “I don’t like the spacing between these images,” (on the completely unstyled printout.)” It was like they’d almost never even looked at the styled site on-screen! Like I said - not exactly the same, but another case of “on-the-page/on-the-screen” not matching up and causing confusion.