Potentials and Limitations with design for screen:
Moving from designing for print to designing for screen can be challenging, as I need to be aware of some unique characteristics to make sure my designs works appropriately.
SPACE IS UNLIMITED
When designing for print you can be limited by the amount of page space that you can use, this means that you need to be able to communicate key messages clearly. This can lead to heavier marketing which isn't always subtle and refined.
On the web, you can the medium to tease out your marketing messages across a virtually unlimited amount of space, allowing you to refine your approach. However, something that worked well for print should not be applied in the same way for screen. Attention spans are shorter on the web than they are for print based media, but this means that you can spread your copy out to become more refined and subtle.
Analytics can be taken advantage of, to see the path the reader takes, allowing you to adapt and improve your copy.
YOU CAN USE RICH MEDIA
In print you're limited to text and image, whereas within digital design you can use a variety of different medias. Clever use of video, audio and user interaction can help you to establish a relationship with your visitor (reader), causing them to spend more time on your website, spend more money in your online shop or recommend your content to more people.
Content should add value to the user experience, offering them an experience or content they can't get anywhere else.
COLLABORATION IS KEY
Print designers tend to work alone whereas within digital design there is a lot more collaboration. This is because it is difficult to have every skill necessary to produce a complete experience.
Most successful websites combine a number of different technologies, requiring disparate skills.
ONE SIZE DOESN'T FIT ALL
When designing for print everything can be reliably measured in inches, picas, and points. The basic unit measurement when designing for screen is pixel - but a pixel might be a different size between two screens.
The most common approach is to assume 72px to occupy an inch, but that’s entirely nominal - on screen, everything is flexible.
YOUR DESIGNS AREN'T SET IN STONE
On the web, different browsers will render your content slightly differently. Text settings can be overridden by your visitors, and depending upon the screen and window size being used your site may render completely differently (in fact, it’s now accepted best practice that it should render responsively to the screen/window size).
One of the strengths of design for screen, is that it’s a fluid medium.
USER EXPERIENCE IS EVERYTHING
The web is an interactive medium that can provide instant feedback to a user. Therefore it is all about creating that user experience, considering how the reader can move around content, navigating from page to page.
Websites often act as brand ambassadors, so it needs to convey all the values of the business it represents. Focus on usability, making interactive areas (such as links navigation bars, image galleries and videos) simple to spot and use.
THE 'FOLD' IS IRRELEVANT
In print you’re always taught to design so that the most important content is 'above the fold' - the part of a newspaper that’s shown when the paper has been folded into its stack.
On the web, there’s still a fold; the area outside the immediately visible portion of the screen that you need to scroll to view; but unfortunately as a web designer you have no way of knowing where that fold is on any given browser’s screen.
The problem is that there are so many different screen resolutions across devices, and users can resize their browser windows, such that what you see as the fold on your computer will almost certainly differ substantially from what everyone else sees.
Focus instead on designing compelling, attractive and engaging content that encourages your visitors to want to scroll to view more!
LAYOUTS ARE 'FLUID' NOT FIXED
Instead of prescribing fixed sized content areas, on the web, individual text boxes, images and columns can be sized according to the width of the browser window (the viewport). This difference does mean you need to let go of the idea that you can completely control how your design is going to render, but it also has benefits.
KNOWING THE BASICS HELPS
Understanding the building blocks to designing for a screen can help to overcome a lot of frustrations when designing.
Taking the time to learn HTML (the basic building block of the web) and CSS (the method by which we apply aesthetic attributes to content), will help you understand both the limitations and opportunities of the medium.
WEB TYPOGRAPHY
Until recently, the web was limited to a very small selection of 'web-safe' fonts. Thankfully, there are an increasing number of web fonts available through services such as Google Web Fonts and TypeKit.
The degree of control over your type is far more limited on screen than in print. For example, you can still set your leading, but there’s no control over kerning whatsoever, and if you want to use ornamental glyphs you’ll need to get work with code to manually substitute letterforms or specialised sub-set fonts.
My thoughts:
I think that it is really important to think about space within my design, this idea of spreading my copy out is something I want to utilise for the recipe method. I think that if I had one step per screen, that you would be able to swipe through, it would make the information more manageable and easier to understand.
I think that I definitely need to consider the user experience, and how I can engage with students. Potentially having a voice control system which would read your recipe out and prevent mucky hands from touching the device.
It is important to realise that working with other people within digital design is very beneficial, if I was to actually produce my app, I would want to be working along side a developer as well as someone skilled at creating user interfaces.
It is important to be aware that every screen comes at different sizes and resolutions this means that my design could change when viewed on a different device than it was originally designed for.
It is clear that scrolling and swiping are interactions which keep the user focussed on your app, this is definitely something I want to try and include when thinking about the user experience.
I think while doing this project it has become very clear that if I knew some of the basics of designing for screen, I will be at an immediate advantage, this is something that I want to look into further over the summer as I believe it could greatly develop my practice.
RESOURCE:
WEB
- http://www.creativebloq.com/web-design/how-design-screen-guide-print-designers-1131786
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