See Jane design newspaper pages. Jane is happy. Now, see Jane's newspaper build a World-Wide Web site.
Jane is unsure. What's your advice: "Run, Jane, Run!" or "Do it, Jane, do it!"?
One thing is certain. The job market in newspaper design isn't exactly squeezing these people out to the Web. The on-line jobs board of the Society for News Design displays 150 to 200 openings for visual journalism posts at a time, all less than 90 days old.
Still, a small but growing number of print-trained designers are trying their hands at the Web. The designers' culture in newspapering is starting to spin like lab samples in a centrifuge.
One could sense it by talking to regulars and newcomers at SND's early-fall annual workshop in Philadelphia (see The Cole Papers, October 1998). As print design matures in the routines of most newsrooms, designers seem unsettled, searching for the edge that once came from being the kids with all the shiny toys and new ideas.
This agitation also comes at the hand of an old friend to designers: computer technology.
It made modern newspaper design possible, and spawned the creativity tools that are standard fare in newspaper design. You know the names: Macintosh, Quark XPress, Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia FreeHand.
It also spawned the Internet and the Web. There, the rules and tools are quite different. Yet there, newspapers wish to stake a claim for news, information and advertising in their markets.
Enter the newspaper designer, the closest job description most newsrooms have to "information architect."
That designer might be comfortable with the broadsheet as a canvas and the four-story features front as a creative outlet. But that newspaper might not be comfortable isolating creative staff members in print while fighting to extend its brand on-line.
Is web work a treat or a torment for newspaper designers? It depends on their background, adaptability, sense of logic -- and spirit of adventure.
Computer science education, followed by programming or designing databases, then a specialty in software usability engineering or interface design.
Folks who started down the last path are rare in newsrooms. In web design, they're both common and essential.
Approaching a web project purely from a graphic arts perspective can make consumers' web visits painful. Just ask Jakob Nielsen, the former Sun Microsystems Inc. usability guru who is now a principal consultant for the Nielsen Norman Group.
Nielsen's background clearly is closest to that last path.
"People aren't sitting there saying, 'I wish this web page could load a little more slowly, because I want to relish all the graphics and pictures as they come onto my screen,'" Nielsen told SND attendees in Philadelphia.
When using computer software, Nielsen said, workflow efficiency declines if the time it takes to move from screen to screen is more than one second. Even the simplest, text-only web page takes longer than that to load. Complex pages, which are more common, take exponentially longer.
Create a home page with a small graphic in the header, another in the footer, a couple of ads and a photograph. Easily, that page swells to 75 kilobytes of data or more. A 56-kilobit- per-second modem, the kind sold with most new home computers, might render that page in 20 seconds. A 28.8 kbps modem, still quite common, ensures a 40-second wait -- all for one page.
Some site visitors will wait. Others will hit the stop button on their web browsers and go elsewhere.
These bandwidth aggravations alone keep some print designers -- especially those who favor aesthetics over functionality -- away from new media work. Other than ink consumption or competition for space, a newspaper designer has no such weighty limitations on using images.
Just when web design starts to look like proofing agate for a living, however, enter ... the Shiny Web Toys -- audio, video and animation. Though by far the most immature technologies of the Web and the most trouble-prone for consumers, these three media are at least available to web designers and not something print designers can publish.
Think of the difference in terms of two chefs:
The web chef serves a meal on a series of very small plates, brought to you on demand. The chef uses many ingredients to prepare your meal, but if he tries to arrange the food too elegantly, it falls to the floor. Yes, you have to wait for each dish to cool before eating, but the chef will keep serving little platefuls for as long as you ask for them.
Tools and techniques
Even the cooking utensils are different.
Some old standby design programs still make sense in the web kitchen; others stay in the drawer. Web designers still need vector graphics programs, such as Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia FreeHand, to create custom type designs and information graphics. And they need imaging programs, such as Adobe Photoshop, to manage photographs and other continuous-tone visuals.
From there, the two disciplines begin to splinter.
Print designers assemble finished pages in what-you-see-is-what-you-get design programs, of which Quark XPress and Adobe PageMaker are common examples. Similar capabilities also crop up in design interfaces for high-end, database-driven publishing systems, such as those sold by CCI Europe and Unisys Corp.
These programs permit excruciating dominion over page details. Note the descriptive terms for these programs: control, precision, detail. You lose some of each with even the best so-called WYSIWYG tools for web design.
"Web design is still in its early stages," said John Caserta, design director for interactive news at the Chicago Tribune. "At some point there may be the super program like Quark. Right now, there isn't that tool out there, just a mishmash."
The prime culprit here is the nature of the Web itself. Imagine looking at reflections of the same newspaper page in three differently shaped fun-house mirrors. Then imagine trying to design that page so it would look and work essentially the same in all the mirrors.
That's how web designers attempt to deal with the different brands and flavors of browsers. A web page that looks great on Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 for Windows may fall apart when interpreted by Netscape Navigator or WebTV.
Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe PageMill and GoLive CyberStudio all offer preview-mode design windows, but they often don't gibe with any (let alone all) web browser displays. And the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) formats that these programs generate vary widely in compatibility and efficiency.
One desktop tool gaining favor with web designers is Macromedia Dreamweaver. More than just a WYSIWYG HTML editor, Dreamweaver offers a surprisingly robust set of design features for working with Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language (Dhtml), especially Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
Features of Dhtml and CSS promise more control. Designers can position elements with greater precision, and apply predetermined styling to HTML text formats throughout a document or an entire site. We're still months away, however, from a point where even the major browser brands (Microsoft and Netscape) will have settled on standards for Dhtml and CSS.
That's no matter to Dreamweaver. It attempts, with general success, to generate Dhtml and CSS routines that will work with both the big-gun browsers. Further, although it includes an XPress-like design mode, Dreamweaver doesn't try too hard to hide the underlying code from the designer.
The Windows version even meshes politely with HomeSite, a popular HTML editor for PCs from Allaire Corp. of Cambridge, Mass.
The program cannot overcome one reality, however: Significant numbers of current web users (half or more, in some surveys) have browsers that won't interpret any versions of Dhtml or CSS.
So Dreamweaver is at best a fine way to experiment with these designer-friendly routines, as publishers wait for the web audience to upgrade.
Production workflow
At the Chicago Tribune, designers favor a flow of designs through several tools, all on the way to a set of databases. The data are then published to the Web using the StoryServer suite of applications from Vignette Corp. of Austin, Texas.
"For us, the design process is sketch-to-Photoshop-to-html-to-StoryServer," Caserta said. Specifically, Tribune design projects begin with pencil-sketch brainstorming sessions, where designers act as hubs of project planning.
"The Web designer goes back a step from what the print designer is doing," Caserta said. "You spend a lot of time creating content. I'm not saying print design is just aesthetics, but in the Web there's often more work in developing the content, writing key paragraphs and even text editing."
Tribune designers flesh out visuals using Photoshop to hone appearance and positioning, then create web shells in HTML for the desired look-and-feel.
StoryServer includes a Java-based editor for HTML and related scripts, but the HTML editor of choice on most Tribune desktops is BBEdit, from Bare Bones Software Inc. of Bedford, Mass.
"All the limitations come out as the process goes to HTML," Caserta said. "Sketching is a beautiful thing, this utopia, but a lot of times you have to sit down and make the code work with the imagery, the animated graphic or the database. There's a lot of tweaking to be done."
Even the best ideas must be made to fit. The Web has no tangible limit on space, but each web document has a practical limit on size.
Space has another dimension in this Web vs. print discussion. Though some papers recently shaved page widths to conserve newsprint, the typical American broadsheet has an image area 12 to 13 inches wide and 21 to 22 inches long.
By comparison, retail computer systems for consumers usually sport monitors with either a 15-inch or 17-inch diagonal measurement. The diagonal size can be misleading. Even the larger 17-inch display offers less than 12-by-7-inches of viewable web browser space -- smaller than a sheet of legal-size paper.
Web designers can't even use all of that space comfortably -- enough older monitors with smaller dimensions remain in service to keep designers aiming for a lower common denominator. For the time being, that's a resolution of 640-by-480 pixels. That means a working palette of 597-by-268 pixels, or roughly 8-by-3.7-inches.
The 5-by-7-inch family photo on your desk has more usable image area.
Of course, if something doesn't fit, users can always scroll, right? Yes, but they simply choose not to, unless they are somehow compelled to drill deep into the content of a document. That compulsion, unfortunately for fans of the in-depth news story, is rare among site consumers.
Yet it is easier for newspaper sites to repurpose single news stories as single web documents than it is to edit and package the same content in smaller, hyperlinked components.
"Hypertext and hyperimages open the door to whole new ways of telling stories," said Ches Wajda, design director for Philadelphia Online, published by the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News. "Newspapers, however, have been slow to capitalize on this feature, and many merely throw up their stories in electronic form."
Still, some web designers see advantages in those oh-so-few pixels.
"I worked with one photographer when I was a designer in print," said Rochelle Lavin, former on-line manager for the St. Petersburg Times in Florida and now a web consultant. "We designed a package where the pictures looked great on the screen and came out an awful red in the paper.
"With the same photographer, we were able to blow him away the first time we put his pictures on-line. We didn't have large resolutions, but everything was crystal-clear, and looked exactly the way he meant it to look."
Lavin, who begins a term as chair of SND's New Media Committee in January, also teaches web design at the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Fla.
"I tell my art students their work will look a lot better on-line than in the paper," she said. "I remind them that people are there, one-to-one, with that computer less than six inches away most of the time.
"Everything looks bigger."
-- Jay Small
Allaire Corp.,
(617) 761-2100,
e-mail: info@allaire.com;
Bare Bones Software Inc.,
(781) 687-0700,
e-mail: sales@barebones.com;
Macromedia Inc.,
(415) 252-2000,
e-mail: customerserver@macromedia.com;
Vignette Corp.,
(512) 502-0223,
e-mail: info@vignette.com.
