I began my design career in Print, with almost no experience in the digital industry at all apart from a few mediocre attempts at building my portfolio site.
When entering the print industry, I had just finished University having spent three years hand-making and binding books and other printed pieces of design. I had high hopes of getting stuck in, with all different exciting types of paper technology, getting to create beautiful pieces printed ephemera, and simply being able to create interesting objects.
Obviously this dream was soon trodden on, and I realised that the industry just isn’t like that. Most of the time, its designing a piece of printed media in InDesign, then passing it onto the PM, who passes it to the client, and thats the last you’ll ever hear of it.
Other than the occasional buzz I got when seeing a 16 or 48 sheet I designed on the London Underground, I soon came to realise, that print just wasn’t for me anymore:
The hours dealing with 16GB Photoshop documents. That panic when you think you may have missed a widow on page 40 of a 200,000 print run and the bollocking that will follow. But most of all, just never seeing the final piece through to the end.
I began pushing my knowledge of web development further, and It wasn’t too long before I was building responsive websites direct to clients on a freelance basis. I loved it. And still love it.
I got to see the project through from the design stages, the build stages, to the finished result every time.
So now 3 years on, I am pretty much a digital-only designer and developer.
I feel privileged to have worked with print designers, and digital designers. As it has taught me a few valuable lessons which brings me to the point in this story.
Both print designers, and digital designers, should all be working to the same goals:
And that is, to get the message to the audience in the most effective way possible, using the most appropriate technologies we have at our disposal.
So I do not know why there is such a huge division between the two fields.
We should all be learning from each other. Print designers tend to have an attention to detail when it comes to typography that is lacking in web design, and web designers have knowledge of the technologies of the future that print designers tend to fear.
We should all be sitting together, working together and inspiring each other. (The same goes for developers, but that's another topic I feel very strongly about, and I'll be discussing it in a later article)
We are all designers after all, with the same obsessive traits, and a love for all things beautiful.