Dear designers I’m working with on a daily basis. (Note: I work for a webagency, where we got some patnerships over with some huge print/design/marketing agencies)
You are, at least most of you, print designers. I am, most of the time, an interface and user interaction designer. I respect and enjoy your work. I love brochures, flyers and posters as mush as one can do.
Actually, I used to be a print designer once. Yup, I even made books. And magazines layout.
Anyway… Our usual scheme is: you design a print campain, send it to our agency and ask us to make it go digital. Which we do. When we can. It always sounds like : make this kakemono a 450 pages catalog. Now!
Actually, it ain’t that easy. Where you design for a medium everyone knows how to use, we design for mediums some people have never touched in their whole life. May they be touch screens, iPad, web browsers or software. So you send us some of your work, like a huge .EPS in 300 dpi, CMJN (yeah well, I’m not good a pre-press files myself, so don’t bite me here) and ask us to do our magic. But not touching anything. Not rescaling your insanely huge comp that will not ever fit on a screen. Not adding anything. Not even adding things like buttons, links, whatsoever. Not listening to advices on usability, accessibility, technics, or others.Well. This, actually, saddens me to no point.
I understand the visceral need to protect your perfectly executed work. I do so too. But when I call a printer, I ask him what he’d do to make my work shine even more on paper. The same applies here. We’re not here to crush your work down. We’re not here to make things “just because” we fancy them. We’re certainly not here to battle our egos. To be honest I don’t give a damn who the credit will be unto after the job is done. My concerns are the users, the results, and the goal the design must attain.
I’m sure you can understand this without having to be beaten by a baseball bat.
Love,
Zélia
Side note: This is for fun purpose only. Bitching is what life is about. If you find it offensive, just write your own complaint to the webdesigners, saying how stupid we are. Nothing can beat that. :3




