Making Sure You Look Good In Print
That website you just designed is great. It loads quick, looks cool, and ticks all the right SEO boxes. But you know what? There’s a lot of people out there who still aren’t comfortable with the internet. Some of those people are in positions of influence, positions to give you business. They might not understand the internet themselves but they know that it’s important.
So they’ll ask someone to give them a printout from your website so they can get some more information. Bit of a disaster if you haven’t addressed print styling in your CSS. All that design work goes to waste and they get a bit of paper with default fonts and messed up layout - no new business for you.
Paper is still first choice for some
Ensuring your site content looks great on paper can be as important as it looking good on screen. I recently learned through a contact that the board of directors at a smallish company were looking to redesign their website from scratch. A good opportunity for me to extend my portfolio, and I knew that my contact was meeting with the board, and so I told him he should pass on my website details.
At which point he pointed out that the board of directors probably weren’t the most IT minded and their age and experience might mean that they were largely uncomfortable with computers all round. They knew intellectually that websites are important for company profile, but it wasn’t something they had any real feel for. My contact suggested that I would have far more success in developing a relationship with them if I could provide some printed material from my website as an example.
It made me realise that the print styling of Fog of Eternity wasn’t something I’d really paid much attention to. I had a very basic stylesheet to ensure that it wouldn’t spill off the page if printed, but hadn’t done much to ensure a consistent branding approach with the site itself. It’s something I remedied quickly, but I was lucky that I’d had prior warning from my contact. If a potential client had just seen a printout before I reworked the style, it wouldn’t have encouraged them to pass me business.
And let’s face it, we all still like to scribble
The whole idea of the paperless office has been bandied around for years, really since the advent of the PC. It never comes to pass though. For all the developments in technology there are still lots of times when a scrap of paper or a printed sheet is the most convenient and practical option.
Paper and pencil lets us scrawl notes in a margin, highlight areas of text we want to change, sketch out rough design ideas and act as an aid to calculation. Of course there are facilities for doing this available as software applications, whether it be a word processor, a graphic design package or the simple Windows Calculator. But while those are useful very often nothing beats the simple immediacy of paper and pencil.
A strong print style for a website lets people play around with a piece of paper. Humans are still tactile beings as well, sometimes we feel more connected to things when we can physically touch them. I’m sure even the biggest techie among us uses paper and pencil from time to time, to scrawl ideas or mental jogs for later. Having your web content styled for easy printing and strong branding means that people have the opportunity to interact with your brand in a much more direct way.
Don’t overlook the printed page
Printed material is still commonly used. Often it might be in the form of brochures and material specifically designed to be presented in hard copy. But it’s important to remain aware that your web content may also be converted into hard copy. Make sure that hard copy is presented well, accessible to readers, and let them really connect with your brand by being able to write all over it, fold it up, tear it or make it into paper airplanes!
Next time I’ll give a guide on the HTML and CSS practicalities of setting up a strong print style for your website.
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