Designing for Print vs. Digital: What’s the Difference?

In this world, where designs of all types are widespread throughout the world, the medium dictates how the message is perceived.

While print and digital design may seem similar at first, they have their own distinctive qualities, tools and strategies. These factors make the two types vastly different from each other, requiring a widely dissimilar approach.

As you may already know from the title and above lines, we are about to dive into the key differences between print and digital designing, exploring how to tailor your creative process according to each medium.

Medium-Specific Constraints and Opportunities:

Print Design:

1. Physicality: Print design is tangible, requiring designers to take into consideration the different parts of a printed article such as paper type, weight and texture. 
2. Irreversible Changes: Once a design has been printed, you cannot change anything on it. This is one of the reasons as to why it is essential that accuracy and attention to detail is crucial.
3. Cost efficiency: While cheaper prints like leaflets or flyers do exist, it is more likely for the average print to cost more to make and distribute than digital documents.

Digital Design:

1. Dynamic Flexibility: Among other things, digital designs can also be interactive or animated, allowing for things like cartoons, clickable buttons and user navigation, all within one design.
2. Resolution Variance: When creating only one type of print design, you need not worry about a bunch of different resolutions and sizes, because each design will require the same settings. On the other hand, however, digital designs tend to be a bit tedious when you have to set up separate resolutions and sizes for different platforms.
3. Infinite Adjustments: Unlike print designs, you can change things in the designs in real time, offering more of a care-free experience, coupled with room for experimentation.

Colour Modes and Usage:

Print Design (CMYK): 

The cyan, magenta yellow and black (CMYK) model rules print design. This is because it matches the pigments used in printers.

• Challenge: Some of the colours visible in the RGB (Red, Green, Blue) colour model are impossible to recreate in this model, requiring careful adjustments when printing.

Digital Design (RGB): 

The RGB model is optimised for digital screens, offering a variety of colours and hues. This model is more popular among the masses for its abilities to capture a plethora of different colours with vibrancy and quality.

(Tip: When designing digitally for print, you should switch to the CMYK model to ensure that you don’t have to redo it after printing.)

Typography Considerations: 

Print Typography:

1. File Preparation: You should ensure that the fonts are converted to outlines before printing, so that you can avoid font substitution during printing.
2. Serif Fonts Shine: Serif fonts shine in print media, as they increase readability in long-form text. They also give the prints a quirkier look, which helps maintain the attention of the reader.

Digital Typography:

1. Responsive texts: In digital typography, you will generally have to adapt and change your fonts and styles depending upon the platform and its recommendations. You will also have to change the resolutions and sizes, catering it to different devices. 
2. Sans-Serif Preference: Sans-serif fonts are typically more sought-after digitally, due to their clarity on most screens. Most posts use sans-serif fonts and think of its utilisation as a rule in digital typography, and there’s a reason you should abide by that.

Interactivity and Engagement:

Print Design:

1. As we mentioned before, print design relies on attributes like texture and finishing to captivate and interest people. 
2. Things like embossing or foil stamping help add another level of depth in prints, opening up another dimension of tangibility and interaction.

Digital Design:

1. While prints offer tangibility as their primary attraction, the case is not the same for digital designs. While it is true that features like clickable buttons, animations and videos do offer a sense of interactivity to a design and you should implement these in your designs, it is also true that at its core, digital designs are not tangible and are meant to be seen through digital screens. 
2. Digital designs offer real-time analytics and feedback which you can subsequently use to refine your designs rapidly, removing all errors made in the designing process.

Conclusion:

Today, we have discussed the different aspects of print and digital designing, including their constraints and opportunities, colour modes and usage, typography considerations and their respective differences of interactivity and engagement. 

Digital and print designs are two sides of the same creative coin—and despite differences, they are still the same at their cores and each requires thorough effort to be made properly.

Designers must understand the nuances of both mediums to provide effective messaging to people. Be it a flyer or an Instagram post, tailoring your designs to the different mediums is the key to success.

We encourage our readers to understand and embrace the mediums’ singularity and embrace the differences, refining their respective designs to suit the medium and the audience.