Web design is not print design

Designing for the web is a different experience than designing for print media. With print you are designing a tactile object that is measured in inches (or centimeters) and printed in pantone colors on a surface of your choosing. With web design you are designing an interactive experience based on pixels, screen resolution, internet speed, and the browser. The designer has more control over the appearance of a print piece than a website. The print designer is only limited by what the client can afford and what would be appropriate. As much as we would like to, we can't choose your screen resolution, internet connection, and browser for you.

What browser you use makes a difference.
A Little Web History - The Browser Wars
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web and the first browser, which he named Nexus. Soon there was competition and Mosaic became dominate due to its ability to display images inline with text. One of the guys who worked on Mosaic founded Netscape which put out the Netscape Navigator.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer entered the picture and the war for dominating the browser market was on. Both Microsoft and Netscape issued proprietary software, so a website would not look the same in both browsers. The both released proprietary versions of JavaScript (Jscript from Microsoft) as well. It was common for websites to have "Best viewed in Internet Explorer" or "Best viewed in Netscape" icons on the home page during this period. Microsoft eventually took a substantial lead when they made the move to have IE integrated into the Windows

operating system.

The problem with all this is that there was a divergence between the guidelines issued by the W3C and what the companies were doing. Instead of fixing bugs and making the browsers compliant with web standards they added new features. The remaining vestige of the original browser wars is Internet Explorer 6.

Internet Explorer 6
The web still has this dinosaur roaming around destroying layouts. IE6 is the least web standard compliant browser in use today. It still maintains a 22% share of the browser market, and it isn't going anywhere for a while. Web designers have to employ hacks to make their layouts, that work in every other browser, work for IE6.

The reason IE6 is so painful to deal with is that it doesn't properly

support CSS and transparent PNGs (here is a work around) and the other modern browsers do. I have written a previous post about why IE6 needs to become extinct.

Screen Resolution
Screen resolution affects how large you can make the website. It limits the design options if you have to optimize a website for 800 x 600 pixel screen resolution. Thankfully most people have a screen resolution of 1024x768 or greater. The growing popularity of mobile devices like the iPhone complicates this issue, but I'm not going to get into that now.

Typography
Your typographic options are limited to the typefaces the user has on their computer or using images. Macs and PCs both come with a standard set of typefaces that you can choose from. When programmers write the code determining the typeface to be presented they always

write a list. If the user doesn't have the first typeface in the list, it checks for the next one and so on. If none of the type faces are present it will display the default serif or sans-serif typeface. The list usually looks something like this - Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, san-serif;

File Size
How large the files are will determine how fast the website loads. How fast it loads will be based on how fast the user's internet connection is. Picture heavy layouts load slower than more text based layouts.

Conclusion
All of these factors influence how you design for the web. It is important that you and/or your client understand the how these factors can limit design options. There is a large difference in your freedom to design for a user with a cable connection, a 1440x900 screen resolution, running Firefox and a massive database of typefaces and a user with a dial-up

connection, a 800x600 screen resolution, running Internet Explorer 5 and the standard set of typefaces.