Suraja Nambiar

The evolution of responsive web designs and how they differ from Print Designs “Responsiveness” is the new cool. Wait! Before you raise an eyebrow, let me clarify, we cannot implicate it with the latest trends because it has been around us for some time now and whether you like it or not it has been evolving with the growing influence of Smartphones. Some food for thought infact... Having said that now let me explore the details into why responsiveness is the key to the customers’ heart? These days all kinds of businesses regardless of the industry domain they belong to emphasize the need for a responsive website. This demand is the business’s perseverance of their need to meet customer’s preferences that is currently prevailing or might emerge at a later point of time. Responsive web designs: An overview As I was talking about the need to introduce responsiveness to meet the growing influence of Smartphones you need to think of a single solution that can fit into a wide range of devices and resolutions incorporating in the future prospects. What do you think I am talking about, hope you are not guessing to design different versions of the same website for powering it across different resolutions or devices or browsers. Of course not! I am not talking about something that has no logic at all. Now, I don’t want my designer friends to lose out business just because they cannot power their websites across all the devices or browsers. Keep calm and embrace the technique of “Responsiveness”! So, what is a responsive web design? The web designer should be capable of incorporating design and development techniques that will respond across different screen size resolutions, platforms, orientations, & browsers regardless of which device is being used to access the site. The user experience while viewing the site via different devices should be of superior quality. An appropriate fusion of images, logical combination of the related CSS media queries, flexible grids and layouts that support the fluidity is the underlying concept that drives a responsive web design to success. What I am trying to explain is the importance of having a flexible design that fits into the user’s device without any change in the image or typography as the user navigates from the desktop PC to an iPhone. This saves the web designer’s effort to design various versions of the design for a variety of devices and browsers or both. According to a post on Smashing Magazine, which describes responsive website design simply as “Responsive Web design is not only about adjustable screen resolutions and automatically resizable images, but rather about a whole new way of thinking about design”. Designing for different devices: Responsive web designs directs to a single website that is capable of responding and adapting automatically according to the device on which it is being viewed. “Mobile first” is the foundation that designers adopt while designing for responsiveness which involves designing for Smartphones (smaller devices) first and then moving upwards (towards bigger devices). Cross browser compatibility: I have seen certain web designers who test their apps and websites across Google Chrome just because they are comfortable with it. But what if your customers are using Opera or Firefox and you have powered it only for Chrome. That is unfair. Here, comes the benefit of using responsiveness where you do not have to worry about adaptability of your website across different browsers. Responsiveness across fonts: Fonts are like human beings as each have a different character and personality. You need to manage fonts wisely when designing responsive web designs and you can choose to use Google Web Fonts that is available for free. Designing images: Websites are texts and images. Implementing CSS wisely across the web for a better image exhibition is an important part of responsive web designs. Longevity: This is one of the characteristic features of Responsive web designs as it can easily incorporate all the futuristic developments. Now let me take you across designing for print: Pixel based and Photoshop are the two kinds of designing used across the print. Photoshop is one of the best roads you can traverse across for image-editing with ease. While you are working on creating a layout, Photoshop provides some of the easiest tools to edit images. Also, typography is quite easy with Photoshop as text can be treated similar to how photos are treated. First the text and photos are subjected to rasterizing, and then we apply filters and effects. People have a common tendency to misunderstand the terminologies related to design for print and web designs. A number of designers are turning coders now for the ease and flexibility of tools that it offers. Designing in print and browsers both share pretty much in common though there are considerable differences between the two. The workflow, file formatting and the methodologies and tools used across both are briefly examined here: 1. Viewing Method: The difference comes with how people view designs in print that differ from how they view the ones designed in browser. For instance, viewing a brochure designed in print and viewing something on the screen is different. Here is what distinguishes augmented world and reality and the designers who work on both these. 2. Experience: User experience is yet another factor that differentiates print and the web designs. How much it appears enthralling to the user is what matters when we talk about experience. Print design comes with a tangible experience while web brings with it the pleasure of audio or video or both. 3. Design Life Cycle (Static vs. Interactive): Once a design has been printed out there is no way to tweak it unless you decide to print it over again and when it comes to web design things can be tweaked. 4. Usability & Navigation: The navigation and usability across the print media extends to just a paper or something of similar physique but the case is different with web designs. The layout of the web design needs to be organized accordingly for a better user experience. 5. Compatibility: Take care to avoid printing the alphabets outside the paper while using print. But web design compatibility is different; the site needs to be compatible across a number of devices and via different web browsers. 6. Size and layout: Both are interconnected as they determine the efficiency of the other. In case of print media the components inside the layout must fit into the printable surface. In web designs, the content should be scaled to fit in across any devices. 7. Resolution: DPI and PPI are the two kinds of resolution and you need to use it carefully as DPI or dots per inch are related to print media and PPI or pixel per inch are related to web designs. The definition says all. 8. File Types: The file types supported in Print and Web includes the following: JPEG, PNG, EPS or PDF And Print supports TIFF whereas Web does not though GIF and SVG formats are specific to Web but not to print designs. 9. Color: Color is a factor that is displayed differently across the print and web designs. CMYK is for print and RGB is for web designs. 10. Typography: Fonts and their case are one of the most important aspects of a design while displaying content and for web designs, Google has its own free case of fonts and with the print design you can easily choose a format that appears appealing. 11. Design Limitations: Talking about the limitations actually there is an infinite universal gap between both the methods used for designing. In web design, though the designer has initial control over his work including the browser experience and the device, but all the remaining decision rests in the hands of the user. With the print media the designer can customize all the components and entities in the design as per their discretion and even in the end product the user has no control. When a designer is working on a web design they follow a set of methods and workflow which reflects in the end product. But in the print media it does not matter what approach you are using to generate the final design, the only thing that matters is whether the end product is appealing or not. Are you a web designer or do you work on print designs? Have you ever tried using responsive web designs? Share your thoughts and experiences with us… We are a digital marketing solutions provider serving numerous clients across the globe with perfectly customized solutions for their online business. They are already soaring towards success. When will you? Contact us today and ask for assistance.