If you've learned your design skills in the context of print, as many designers do, and you want to try your hand at some Web design, you have an excellent head start. Print designers develop a vital appreciation for form and space. This allows them to create balanced or dynamic layouts depending on the mood of the communication. Balance gives a feeling of authority, solidity and permanence where dynamism suggests modernism and progressiveness. A page layout is very like an abstract painting. It has solid areas, spaces, textures and colors that combine to create these feelings of harmony or tension. Where dynamism is a positive attribute, an untidy or haphazard layout that doesn’t quite hold together can suggest instability. All this happens the instant you look at a page and before you read a word. First impressions… and all that! Creative page layout is definitely an art. Then there’s the color scheme. The use of color is more than just for superficial, decorative reasons. The tone and juxtaposition of various hues, shades and tints also create evocative undertones that make the viewer more receptive to the message. Everybody is familiar with the concepts of red = hot and blue = cold. Those are instinctive associations that we adopt at a very early age. The effects of other, more complex color combinations require a great deal of study. There's no substitute for mixing real paint or inks when exploring the language of color – more beneficial than dabbling with a graphics program on a computer. As with layouts, a designer who is in control of color can work wonders. Bad use of color is like music that’s out of tune – it puts people off even when they are not actually conscious of the fact. When print designers attempt to transfer their knowledge and skills to Web design, much of what they learned is still perfectly valid and provides an excellent starting point. On the other hand, the Web is a completely different medium, and if they try to treat a Web page exactly as they would a printed page – and many do – things won't work out as well as they should. Old habits are hard to break – but it's better to break the habits than the Web pages! Below, I will examine some of the more crucial differences in designing for print and for the Web.