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I tried not to enter this debate (again). But I can't keep quiet. There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about the nature of the design constraints for computers and phones and the differences between the control one has on those domains versus on a printed page. I am certain that this group includes numerous, excellent web designers. But others of you seem completely ignorant of the rather horrid limitations of website design, but that hasn't stopped you from making comments. There seems to be a huge confusion, believing that traditional typographical design rules can apply directly to the web. Experienced web designers: either stop reading now, or read it and send in corrections or enhancements. Let me try to explain some of those challenges. Designing websites for the incredible variety of systems and displays and brands all with different rules and languages, is a real design change. It is a different world from paper. The displayed page may look like a printed page, but consider these facts. (Facts, not opinions). The designer has no control over size, resolution, or color fidelity of the device on which it is to be displayed. People read websites on tiny phone and on huge screens: Take a look at Apple's largest displays: huge. On top of that, the user may make the window of the browser tiny or large, narrow, or broad. Lines usually automatically adjust to the browser width, hence little control over line length. The display may be mounted in landscape or portrait mode. The screen resolution varies dramatically (pixels/inch or cm). And pixels are neither points nor ems. The very same text displayed on a Macintosh comes out a different size than on a Windows machine, even using the same browser and display monitor. Then we have different operating systems. About 5 versions of Windows are still being used and maybe even more versions of the Mac OS. Then there are browsers, that do the rendering: there are three major brands: Windows Explorer, Apple Safari and Google Chrome. Each of these has many different versions. You do not know what fonts are available. Implications: You can affect but not completely control: * white space * line length * the font family being used (whatever font you specify in the HTML code may not exist on the machine that is displaying the information). * Kerning? Hah. forget about it. You can't even control the font family or the spacing between lines or where the line breaks occur. * The material to be displayed. Example: this email. Modern systems allow some control over formatting through the use of HTML items such as lists (numbered, bulleted, or just lists). Indentation. My email system lets me specify font size as "small, medium, large"). Bold and italic font. But List Servers such as this one do not allow that. I had to switch to "plain Text" in writing this, else my submission gets rejected. Suddenly the font on my screen is tiny. I cannot change it I have no idea how this will be displayed on your screen. Moreover, i cannot change indentation, do underlines or bold or italics. This is the world of design for the web. Tell me again about my use of white space, kerning, and balance for this email? My choice of font family? You have more control over how my writing is to be displayed than I do, but neither of us has much control. Learn a page display language, the most common (and required standard) being HTML (HyperText Markup Language) plus the associated scripts that attempt to specify the typographical components (CSS scripts). There are many HTMLs, for each year new specs are added. HTML5 is the latest. NOTE. No vendor of browsers has ever implemented the official HTML standard. Even though they take part in developing these standards, they never implement all of them. So something that renders well on one browser may fail to show up on another. (there are lots of good (and BAD) technical and operational reasons for not fully developing to the standard, but it causes real havoc.) (The people from the company who helped develop the standards are often powerless to get the developers in their own company to adhere to them.) There are also different standards for animation and dynamic text. Many different tools. Flash is commonly used, but I predict it will cease to exist. HTML5 now does some of what flash used to do. Adobe (the developer of Flash) is now providing yet new tools (Edge, among others) so that flash developers can still program in ActionScript, but it compiles into HTML5. (ActionScript is a time-based editing language.) Web developers have to learn many languages: HTML5, ActionScript, and all the various specialized components of whatever tools they prefer to use. These languages are continually continually changing to keep up with the developers' demands and the changes in technology. Just keeping up to date is hard work. Studies by my company (and many others) show that people look at and read web pages very differently than they read printed documents. We record eye movements, have people solve problems, watch people doing their normal work, etc. Eye movement patterns are very different. depending upon the task and very different on websites than on phones than on paper catalogs or newspapers. It is all very nice to say that websites should be evaluated by printing them out, but that is not how we teach people to do it. That is because real people use the web pages: they do not print them out. Moreover the printout will not look like what is on a browser. We teach that they have to evaluate websites on real monitors with real OSs and browsers. Any decent web producer has a battery of different machines and displays. Websites are tested on a variety of combinations. Even then, it is impossible to test all the many weird configurations people actually use, yet the goal is to make a website look good on all of them. (This is why Apple and Microsoft release their systems in "Beta": Even though they have huge testing labs, they can only test realistically if millions of people try and give feedback. And even then, they won't get al the configurations, which is why after an official release, there will still be bugs and problems that have to be fixed with patches.) And much of the material is dynamic, tailored for the viewer: advertisements, even articles. Photos. Editors expect to e able to add or subtract photos by themselves into a template. They will change the length of the captions and the text. Some systems automatically compile text for each viewer. So how can you lay out something when you don't know how many illustrations, or their size, or the size of their legends, or the amount of text, or the sizes of headlines? --- Today, it is about to get better for the user and far worse for the designer. The development of gesture-based phones and tablets has caused every vendor -- Google, Apple, and Microsoft -- to bring out entirely new ways of displaying material, changing the rules. Google just brought out "Ice Cream Sandwich," their new OS that is quite different from what is now on the market. Apple has iOS5. Microsoft is bringing out Windows 8, again a major, rather revolutionary departure from existing systems. Although Android and iPhone displays look similar, Microsoft's new system looks very different. All companies said "the very same application can run on a Computer, a smart phone or a tablet." (Google does not (yet?) make a computer. They do make "Chrome," a cloud-based computer, but it uses their Chrome browser to display everything, so one could think of it as a tablet with bit in keyboard, that may or may not have a touch-sensitive screen.) Touch sensitive screens: suddenly the rule for targets -- the things you click - change. Fingers are not a precise as a mouse pointer or a stylus. So the screen design has to accommodate the fact that any display might now be controlled by touch. So you can't have touchable items close to one another -- and they must be big enough. This means, for example that you can't have a list, where someone just points to the list item of interest: the finger point is not accurate enough to select one word or one line out of normally-spaced type. Each company's system is different than the others. So web developers have to encode differently for the different OSs, and the different browsers. And although it is nice that the same apps might run on everything, where everything uses touch and gesture (yes, even computers -- although they will still have a keyboard and mouse, except for Apple where the mouse, I predict will be replaced by their touchpad). And now the same information will have to be read on a tiny phone screen (and the phone screens vary a lot in size), on tablets (where they already come in many sizes. Apple has its touch and iPad. Android tablets are made in 5", 7" and 10" (and others). Microsoft has yet to enter the game but they are coming on strong: their new Windows 8 system for smart phones (think Nokia reborn), tablets, and computers is very exciting: it is the best one out, I believe. (well, it isn't quite out yet). Getting legible type -- form size, contrast, and line length -- is a real challenge. But it can be done. Designers have some control, but the design must figure out the size of the browser, the brand and release of the browser and OS, and even the screen resolution and size and display accordingly. Lots of conditional statement. Yes, a lot of this is automated. But when you see the results of the automated systems you will cringe even more. ------ I don't do web design. I do interaction design. Actually, what i really do is advise companies on who they have to hire on where their design team should be situated. On the need for multidisciplinary teams, with designers usability experts, engineers, programmers, and marketing all in the same room from day one. Where they are co-located. Central design studios are a disaster (as are central marketing and central engineering). The people o a project have to move to the project location. Designing modern products is not a craft skill It is a complex mix of disciplines each with its own powers and constraints. Often these constrains are incompatible, which is why the teams have to be co-located -- so they can work out a decent result. This is hard work. Challenging. Fun. It is about to get far worse in the attempt to make the end results far more exciting and powerful. In the startup companies i advise, if the people are not careful al their resources are being used simply to keep their systems running on the many varieties of Blackberries, iPhones, and Android phones out there. So don't do it, i say. Design for just one phone: whichever is your customer base. It used to be that this meant Blackberry for business people and Android or iPhone for the others. iPhone used to be the obvious choice, but now Android is used by more people than iPhone, but it is much more difficult to design for because of the variety of models. So too with websites. And remember, people more and more view websites on phones. And people less and less print web pages. Tablet viewing has replaced printing. ===== Thank you for your patience Don