For a well seasoned Print Designer the web and websites are still in their infancy in comparison to print, but websites are not going away and a lot of people, entrepreneurs, creatives and businesses need them to get themselves in front of their ideal client.

As a Print Designer you are a visual communicator; you know your process, you know how to speak to and engage your targeted audience. The refined print design skillsets you posses can very easily be applied to web design.

With present technology, creating for the web is not straightforward and for the most part is complicated and frustrating. Print design is totally visual, backed up with layout fundamentals: fonts, colours, and human psychology to make it all come together. Web design on the other hand is code driven and with the additional piggybacking of a visual interface on top of a CMS (Content Management Systems) leaving the untrained open to hours of frustration, and confusion, as you navigate the environment, and potentially leave yourself open to hackers!

So in a nutshell it is a daunting task for a skilled professional Print Designer to create a modern and fully functional website -  until now! The macOS based application Sparkle is your visual solution. Why? Because it behaves exactly like the common industrial standard layout publish interfaces such as Affinity Publisher, Adobe inDesign, or Quark Express. So you, as a Print Designer, will use your print layout skillset to create your standout creation and Sparkle (as you Publish to your host server) will do the heavy lifting of converting your layout design into web compliant html / CSS / javascript code... It is that simple! You design and Sparkle codes - a win win for professional print designers!

Sparkle's canvas is where the magic begins... Placing visual design elements like boxes, buttons, text boxes, image boxes, a big selection of fonts, colours, and patterns. Using supporting platforms such as Unsplash, Pexels and Pixabay for their copyright free imagery and videos,  part integration with third party e-commerce platforms such as Ecwid and Snipcart, booking platforms such as Opentable and theFork, and calendar platforms such as Calendly Meeting and Houfy Property Availability, you can see that you can visually layout and build (without touching code) a fully functional and engaging modern website using the latest web language and aimed at your ideal client.

Sparkle works across a number of "Devices" like desktop, tablet, and mobile. Similar to you working across fixed print mediums like billboards, posters, and brochures, Sparkle allows you total control over the fixed layout devices you choose to support. For example, your mobile device's main navigation can be totally different to your desktop device’s main navigation allowing for the same print medium work-set you would use when designing campaigns across the different artboard sizes.

In other words, Sparkle allows you to create unique tablet & smartphone versions of your desktop site - how cool is that! The canvas uses fixed pixel perfect positioning, like when laying out an artboard for print, so what you see on canvas is how you will see it on the web.

So, as you used your imagination to create for print guided by the principals of print, the same can be said for Sparkle’s method - using your professional print layout skills for the web… and to be honest, we can surely use your eye for layouts as the web can and often has become a sea of monotonous boxes stacked on top of one another.

The combination of our love for the Sparkle web design platform combined with the time constraints that web designers work under inspired us to make the lives of print designers easier and more time effective by creating our range of Flamin’ Fig themed templates.

From wireframes, to landing pages, to small / medium sites, to the big end of town with fully functional web 3.0 elements, we have it covered. We’ve given you a head start and can’t wait to see what you publish!

POST THOUGHTS
Being a graphic designer myself, I have had many years of experience living in both worlds of print and web. Of course the web isn’t totally print however, print design principals can be used for the web. In doing so the trick is to find a solid web design platform that allows for the principal of print design to be used with the added bonus of not using code in any which way!

It took me a while and a lot of experience to know what I was looking for; I was so grateful that I eventually stumbled across Sparkle. At first I thought ‘this looks too basic to allow me to do what I want to do’, but I gave it a try anyway. Within the hour I realised how this mild and meek web design platform was a beast allowing me to create outstanding websites with pixel-perfect accuracy! I was hooked…

Two and bit years later Sparkle has gone through a number of pleasantly surprising updates which have allowed me to create so much more excitement and diversity in my projects.

The icing on the cake is that everything that is Sparkle runs on my macOS computer (under localhost) giving me total control over my IP (Intellectual Property) and peace of mind!

For me Sparkle has allowed me to merge both my worlds of print design and web design on the one design platform - I’m happy!