Making the Transition from Graphic Design to Web Design

Aimed at print designers who wish to learn the necessary skills for Web design, Taking Your Talent to the Web explores how sites work, how readers use them, and the implications for those who design them. In this exclusive article the author, Jeffrey Zeldman, explores the transition.

Taking your talent to the Web. It sounds a little odd and a bit daunting. Why would anyone want to do this? There are, of course, the obvious commercial considerations:

You're a print designer with a small but successful business. You pride yourself on the breadth as well as the quality of your services. When clients request letterhead, branded novelties, or tee shirts emblazoned with their logo, you happily produce these items in addition to your usual line of work. Yet when these same clients seek a Web site, you send them to a competitor's shop.

Or, your career in print design, book design, package design, or advertising has hit a ceiling. You do well enough, but can't seem to reach the next level, and the people above you on the corporate ladder appear eager to keep their jobs. You long to try something new.

Or, increasingly, you find yourself visiting sites on the World Wide Web, marvelling at their creativity, and fantasising about a career in Web design. But you fear that it may be too late. The train has pulled out of the station, and you feel that you will never catch up.

Or, your boss expects you to create Web banners or even fully functional Web sites in addition to the work you normally perform. You'd tell him to take a hike, but you just bought a new house and you need this job.

There are as many reasons to take your talent to the Web as there are designers and art directors.

For designers, as well as a career transition, it is, more importantly, a conceptual transition. For

taking your talent to the Web requires major conceptual shifts: from a world of fixed dimensions and absolute design control, to a realm where the design is more like a composer's score than a recorded performance.

Working Web designers also need to constantly expand their existing skills and deepen their understanding of how the Web works and where it is going.

The Web is changing quickly. For years it has been a visual medium hacked together by deforming HTML and other basic Web languages. But emerging technological standards (www.webstandards.org) make it possible to design the Web in entirely new and better ways. By learning how Web standards work and by shifting their thinking, Web designers can create sites that look and work far better than yesterday's sites--sites that shine in modern browsers while remaining accessible to a businesswoman's Web-enabled cell phone, or a blind man's Braille reader.

Existing Web designers also need to prepare for these changes in the medium and new and would-be Web designers will need to enter the field with a true understanding of how the medium works, and how it best may be produced.

Taking Your Talent to the Web is written for professionals in a competitive market. Therefore it spends much of its time talking about job skills and production techniques, present and future. But designers do not live by bread alone--not even when it's really good bread. If the Web is fascinating simply as a medium rife with challenges and rich in possibilities, it is even more alluring when you consider its low barrier to entry. This medium does not merely permit you to publish your own work, it begs for it.

From a purely selfish point of view, most of today's best-known Web designers are famous for their personal sites, not for their commercial projects (though these are of course viewed and respected). Sites like www.volumeone.com, www.fray.com and www.praystation.com have brought renown to the independent designers that created them--and frequently brought clients to these designers' businesses as well. Fame may seem a silly thing to seek, but it sure doesn't hurt when you're looking for your next job or your next client. Or approaching a backer to start your own agency.

By creating and maintaining sites that cannot be controlled, compromised, disfigured, or deleted by the indifference or poor judgement of clients or managers, you will always have good work to show for yourself.

If you were a classical composer, you'd have to pay a symphony orchestra just to hear your own music. And if you were a filmmaker, forget about it. But in independent Web production, the only questionable part of your budget is how much time you can afford.

No one is in control of this space. No one can tell you how to design it, how much to design it, when to "dial it down". No one will hold your hand and structure it for you. No one will create the content for you.

What is in you? What thwarted creative potential is burning to get out, grow, and find its audience?

If you do this well, it will reflect back into the work you do for clients. Not only will this help your career, it will also enrich your life, and the lives of others.

Creating your content, designing it your way, repositioning yourself from vendor to author, you will have made your mark on the medium and perhaps on your generation. You will have taken your talent to the Web.

Jeffrey Zeldman'sTaking Your Talent to the Web is published by New Riders.