Printing industries landscape as we know it has been changing painfully fast. Lot of us are got up in this rapidly changing world from print to digital. Today most of us spend time on our mobile phone searching for information with a click of a finger. So, as a print designer we spend our time creating brochure, print ads, and magazine are our thing. But while they will not disappear completely. It’s simply hard to ignore websites and digital design are here to stay. In order to keep up with the curve at this point we need to add digital skills to our toolkit.

Changing from print to digital sound intimidating, the reality is the design concept is still the same, we are still using font, color, balance and white space to create visual appealing concept. instead of visualizing concept on paper, now we have to think interactive, or user experience, 

Moving forward, there are few differences between print and digital as follow:

Colour modes:
Print use CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) white digital uses RGB (red, green and blue) to make up of multiple rainbow shades. These two formats follow different rules, so any color scheme displayed on a screen in RGB needs to be converted to CMYK for print, and vice-versa.

Measurement system.
Most of us search information through our smartphone screen, it uses pixels, and since pixels are the go-to for the new measurement, if we’re coming from print, which uses inches therefore, we need to tweak our pre-existing skillset for digital specific requirements.

UX focus.
Designing for digital is very different from print. Digital media is fluid, digital pages can be used in different devices and have different experienced by various user. It is interactive experience while in print, all the viewer experiences are the same.

Learning some basic
Learning basic coding program such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript can be an advantage. Just using basic code to make some changes in the webpage can be a great help. It also help to communicate with the developer more efficiently because of the ability to speak their language.

Additional software program.
Even though knowing program such as illustrator, photoshop and InDesign can be very useful.

Having additional program such as Adobe An (create animation for website), Xd (software that allows users to create design and prototypes, presentations and workflows and team collaboration) can help in website creation.

Understanding the differences in print and digital design helps the transition easier and less intimidating. Final point to keep in mind is to continue education and keep ourselves up to date by reading tech related blog.