MikePadgett.com

Graphic Designers are not Web Designers

— Glad you could join us: communications agencies have finally decided that the Internet is highbrow. Hold on tight!”

This item is a follow-on really from a statement I made in my previous article about User Experience 2005: how we are web designers rather than artists.

J recently pointed out to me a website she’s been looking at called Heavy Backpack. It’s billed by its makers as a “Creative Catalogue” – in other words a mini portfolio for each of its contributors and there are some outstanding examples of graphic design in there with the usual derivative stuff.

Heavy Backpack

But the site itself is what interested me first. It looks attractive, along similar lines as K10K or any number of those horrible awards sites that all present us with a cutting edge mostly made out of Flash.

Now, of course I realise that the right way to do this kind of magazine (or catalogue or whatever) site is to mute your design so as to let the content do the talking, but being a person interested in the details, I couldn’t help but notice as the site slowly loaded that there were so many images on the page.

My interest was piqued and I dived right into the source code to see what efforts had been made.

Few. 27 validation errors in HTML 4.01 Loose. A cherry pick of the accessibility issues includes those perennial favourites tiny type, iframes and almost no alt attributes.

The team that put Heavy Backpack together is Wade Studios, an Australian business with a good client list. Very talented graphic designers, clearly, but as web designers they ain’t.

In the last year, I have become increasingly convinced that to call yourself a web designer today means that you are a proficient XHTML/CSS coder, a standards evangelist and well-versed in usability and accessibility best practices. So says Zeldman, so says O’Shea and all that lot, so says Nielsen, and so say I. A graphic designer is not a web designer.

Quote:

“Too many graphic designers have tried to force the Web to be what it is not, in the process creating ineffective and sometimes unusable websites. Quality web design is driven by information architecture design principles. Graphic design should support these principles.” – Gerry McGovern

Graphic design houses ignored the Internet. It was low culture for a long time and there was no money in it. But today, interactive projects can rival those in other media in scale and value and now these same graphic design houses are selling their web capabilities where they can’t get through the door on the back of print alone.

But in truth, the fuddy old Art Directors don’t understand websites. Just as some design houses tried to stay aloof when DTP was adopted by all walks of employee (even though the product was crap, it was certainly cheap) they also missed the boat with the Internet.

Hence why the code is neanderthal, or worse, art program-generated.

Hence also why it’s pretty but without practicality.

[See also: Design Choices Can Cripple A Website by Nick Usborne, 08/11/2005 A List Apart]