What Happened? The Layout Looked Great!

You impressed the higher-ups with your great idea and the layout you presented sealed the deal. But when your design got published — either posted to the company website or printed — something went wrong. Maybe it was drastic, maybe not. But here’s the thing: Producing web-ready files is very different from producing print-ready files. Maintaining design integrity varies by medium, and if you want your design to publish as you envisioned it, it’s imperative that you honor those differences. Here are the fundamentals you need to know about implementing your design for print versus the web.

Production for Web Design

For our purposes here, web design covers all types of design for on-screen viewing. Although designing for the process of print is more critical, the web has it's own considerations. The web "page" not only has to carry the burden of communicating at a lower resolution, but often with less overall space. Plus, that space has to be shared with primary navigation elements, secondary navigation elements, peripheral links and who knows what else. Potential information overload is much more critical in web design.

On the up side, the web uses the RGB format, which has a wider color range and its illumination (from your monitor) allow colors to be more brilliant and saturated. Plus, digital photography is also RGB, so there is no conversion necessary and color correction is usually much less involved. Perhaps the biggest benefit of the web relative to print design, though, is that you can make updates instantly.

Production for Print Design

Designing for print is, in many ways, less forgiving than designing for on-screen display (web, mobile, kiosks, etc.). Great care needs to be taken to ensure that a design looks correct in its final form. In the best of all worlds, you’ll optimize your computers and monitors with external calibration devices and software for print previewing. You also need to be mindful of the limitations of the end printer, its resolution and color limitations. A file optimized for the office laser printer probably won’t cut it for a commercial, sixcolor press.

Once your design is complete, you’ll want to see color proofs to ensure that it looks correct before it actually prints. Then, when the job is on the press, it’s a good idea to monitor it to ensure that proper color is achieved throughout the press run. Because when it's printed, it's done — and there is no adjustment until the next printing.

Print is also a high-resolution medium, so image files must be large enough to reproduce cleanly. A digital image/photo for print must be in 300ppi (pixels per inch) in most applications to ensure quality output. Screen resolution, on the other hand, is only 72ppi. That makes print over 4x the resolution of the web! Which is to say, that web image you love cannot simply be plucked from your site and inserted into a print design file, unless you’re OK with soft, fuzzy, pixilated photos. In addition, photos have to be converted from RGB, a three-color mix, to CMYK, a four-color mix, then color-corrected for output in print. Otherwise they can end up looking washed out or muddy.

Summary

Poor or unenlightened production is the enemy of good design. So if you want your message to be delivered to the end user as envisioned, you, or your chosen design partner, need to understand the nuances of print versus web production and honor them. Otherwise, the integrity of the design will be compromised.

- Back to Newsletter Home