One thing that has been on my mind recently is the differences in print and digital graphic design. I have began to deeply consider the area of usability when designing for the web. While I still don’t preform any sort of usability testing to my web designs, I have been looking into quick and inexpensive ways to add it into my work flow. Two services that I have been using are Five Second Test and Attention Wizard. Both of these can give extremely valuable information on your design and help you improve your design based on user feedback and “heat maps”.

This brings me to my original thought of differences in digital and print graphic design. While a multi-disciplined graphic designer can have an excellent visual language and apply these talents to both print and web, will the web design be effective if usability is not considered in the design problem? I read an article on Smashing magazine recently that was talking about conventions in web design and listing various standard methods for applying forms, call to action buttons, and other web elements that have proved to be effective. One example of this was simply to add form descriptors above the field, which seems like such a small design decision, but this has been proved to be most effective through several human computer interaction testings.

Conventions and Usability is really such a large part of web design, which I think is still not getting enough attention in the business of web design. It switches the paradigm of the role of the traditional graphic designer, where grids, typography, and color become a sort of behavioral science. This can mean that things like ergonomics and human factors take precedence over personal taste or subjective criticism. Designers are using statistics and test results to make better informed design decisions. The use of grids, type and color are simply as a means of getting to a highly usable solution.

While I personally think that usability should be considered over visual aesthetics, it does not excuse the fact that websites should be beautiful. If one were to consider both usability and visual aesthetics as the design problem the solution would be visually pleasing and highly usable.