I was checking my personal email, and I noticed there was one marked as spam. I read the excerpt of the contents of the email provided by Gmail and found that the email was from the person who was ultimately hired at Inland Printworks. He said he Googled "Inland Printworks" and found my site. He seems like a nice enough guy; he went so far as to offer to meet with me and give me pointers on Quark Xpress. Though it was nice of him to offer, I'm not sure I want to head back in the direction of print design any time soon. I've decided web design is where my skills--and, more importantly, joy--lie.
Anyway, this got me thinking about a conversation very near the end of my stint at Inland Printworks. Bill, the owner, wanted to see some of my web sites. I showed them to him, and of course he nitpicked them. "What's your tracking set to?" he asked. Well, Bill, there is no tracking in web design. I had to explain to him how web design differed from print design. I described why web design was in some regards much more difficult than print design. In print design, you are dealing with a static design, what you see is what you get. Web design, I informed him, is much more complicated than that, requiring the designer to take into account the multitude of different operating systems, screen resolutions and browsers. I was proud of myself. Bill, you may know print design, but I know web design. No one can tell me otherwise.
