If you've designed more than a couple sites for people, you've almost certainly heard a comment that sounds something like this: "That would look better if you could move that graphic over about 2 millimeters to the right." The problem with this attitude is that it is based on a fallacy. Specifically, that fallacy is that you can design a Web page that will look identical and pixel perfect no matter where you view it. This is most often heard by two different types of people:
- Print designers
These are the clients who have never worked in the Web before, or have only designed brochures and pamphlets, items that are printed and will look the same as long as the printer uses the correct combination of inks. These people expect Web pages to look the same no matter what the conditions are: browsers, monitors, color-depth, all those issues are seen as trivial and surmountable to the print designer. - Graphic designers
These are the designers who work primarily with graphics. While they may understand more about how colors are distorted on browsers, they are also often more picky about spacing and location. The graphic designer is the person who you will hear arguing against using CSS for font styling ("use a graphic instead"), because you can't be 100% sure 100% of the time that the customer will have the font. Plus, they will argue, with a graphic you can be absolutely sure that the spacing, leading and tracking will be correct.
Web Design Reality
The graphic and print designers complaining about your Web designs are professionals and they do know what they are talking about. But the reality is that the Web is not print and it's not a great big graphic. And trying to force it to be that to serve the needs of these types of designer is just a bad idea.
- Color Color on the Web is problematic for the print designer. While it's much more reliable than it used to be, there are still problems. If you use a laptop the colors you see are much more washed out than I see on my CRT. The same is true for LCD flat-panel displays. And have you ever seen what many of the cheaper projection units do to colors? Reds turn brown, blues turn black, greens and yellows turn muddy grey and worse. And don't get me started on palm devices like PDAs and phones - their color (if they have it) is often rudimentary. Now, if you're designing a Web page for yourself, you can pick colors that work for just you. But most of us are designing pages for hundreds or hundreds of thousands of readers. We can't control what type of monitor they're viewing our pages with, so we need to design using colors that are fairly basic and realize that they might not look as nice on other screens.
- Layout Layout is one of those things that many Web designers believe that they can control. Tables! CSS! The reality is that neither of these will result in the "pixel perfect" layout that layout artists claim. There are so many browser/OS combinations out there that there is bound to be one that doesn't display your layout correctly or even destroys all your hard work in a crush of smashed images and scrollbars. If you're determined to have a layout that looks identical in every browser, you'll have a lot of coding and maintenance ahead of you. You'll need JavaScript and CSS experience and all that work will still fall by the wayside the first time someone browses your site with images turned off, JavaScript disabled, or in a text only browser or a cell phone.
- Fonts The graphic designer who says that fonts are impossible on the Web is correct. After all, there is no way to guarantee that everyone who views your Web site will have the same fonts. However, if you use relative lengths you can be sure that whatever font you use, it will look correct relative to the rest of the page, and it will be accessible. Because, the reality of Web design is that unless you're planning to make every page of your site one large graphic, your page will have text on it. And that text can be manipulated by the readers of your site. Don't believe me? In Internet Explorer, go to the View menu and choose a different Text Size. In Mozilla/Netscape click Ctrl-= or Ctrl-- Many people browse with font sizes larger than the "standard" and if your site fights that, you'll just be annoying them.
