This is a post for designers – it’s a primer on what you need to know when you start designing an email invitation or newsletter.
Print vs Email:
Very simply, you can’t approach an email design job in the same way that you approach a print design job. First up, you can’t do it in Illustrator (or Freehand if you still live in 2004) – you need to work up a wireframe and look & feel in Photoshop, and then create an HTML template. From there you can talk to the editor or copywriter and start creating graphics for specific articles.
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Most of the time, we get asked for web design. This is fine – we do very nice web design – but describing the creation of a website as “web design” misses out some fundamental considerations that go into creating a successful website, such as online marketing and web development. It also misses out vital processes, like planning site structure, usability considerations and information delivery. We’re going to look at the first step in the grand process of “web design” which is known as: Wireframes.
Defining Web Design: Site Architecture and Graphic Design
We generally split our design practices into 2 distinct skills: Site Architecture, and Graphic Design:
- A Graphic Designer is concerned with colour, visual balance, guiding user interactions through visual emphasis and making the site look cool (or slick, or sophisticated, or the ever-descriptive “cutting-edge”). The Graphic Designer produces the look & feel for the website.
- A Site Architect is concerned with planning the layout of the website. This person looks at the proposed content for the site and works out how best the information can be delivered to users of the site. The layouts that the Site Architect produces are called wireframes.
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