Web Design for Print Designers (WD4PD)
A Series Introduction
When the Monkee-Boy team decided to kick off the official Monkee-Blog, one of our goals was to keep it as “noise free” as possible and hopefully break through the static. Our goal is to create an informative tool for our audience and provide educational, industry appropriate, tactical take-aways for our audience demonstrating how a blog for a business can help educate and inspire. No pressure, right?
As Founder and Creative Director here at Monkee-Boy, I can say that mission certainly raises the bar on how to gracefully approach the discussion of web design. Much of our day-to-day activities involve pulling stuff out of thin air and translating client requirements into business appropriate visuals while pushing Photoshop as far as possible to meet that delicate balance of “pop” and “interaction”. So the challenge here is breaking that process and complexity down into digestible chunks of web design nuggets (yummy!).
The other thing that has to be factored into any discussion of web design, and every discussion with clients when delivering comps for sure, is that “design is subjective”. Our collective approach here is to
not get into why I think “orange is making a comeback online” and that “gradients are your friends” but to provide a common demographic of print designers with nice takeaways to get up-to-speed in the world of web design.
So this is where the Web Design for Print Designers (WD4PD) series plugs in.
Our goal here is to provide the following:
- Help you, the print designer, sleep better at night knowing you are not alone. (check!)
- Help you extend your traditional services online and expand your business.
- Help raise awareness into the biggest “gotchas”, educate you on why they are important keep in mind, and give you background information into why these problems/solutions are important so you explain to your clients why certain creative decisions were made throughout the design process.
- Explain how design decisions hurt/help your client’s search engine rankings.
- Working with developers and the overall best process (from our perspective) of designing sites and how to package them up for developers to start the coding process.
- Take the subjectivity of design out of the equation and provide real world issues that need to be considered when working on web designs and pitching web design services.
- Hopefully establish a relationship between you the print designer and Monkee-Boy to create mutually beneficial partnerships.
So, getting #1 above out the way, get some rest knowing that you are not along and we will be tackling lots of useful information over the next couple of months. If you have any topics you would like us include as part of the discussion, please send them to me (Hi, I’m Aaron) at aaron@monkee-boy.com.
