CSS for Print Designers

2. From Picas to Pixels

Learning and Embracing the Medium of the Internet

We print designers are the type of people who like to turn things over in our hands and see them from all angles. We care about paper selection for the way it feels and how the ink will react. We run our fingers down the binding. We ensure that our most important jobs have a press check in the budget. And when we’re out to dinner with our families, they roll their eyes when we drag our fingernails across the varnish of the menu to see if it leaves a mark.

When it comes to Web design, we might feel out of our element because we can’t put our hands on a finished product and touch it. There’s a tactile quality to print design that’s missing from the Internet—there’s no doubt ...