I was just listening to what newspaper designer Jacek Utko said at a TED conference a few months ago; and it seemed to me that the most important part of what he said came towards the end - his description of design as part of a process of ‘not chaning the look but improving the product completely’.

That’s what most designers tell their clients upfront and it is one of the things that gets most easily overlooked. So the design process sometimes ends up being alienated from what the very essence of the product itself. And putting old wine in new bottles can be the easy way out: it might work for a while too.

Experience gained the hard way - which also fetched him some great Society for News Design awards - is perhaps what prompted him to also say that design cannot be separated from the content factor.

He also talks of how it could also involve big changes including the workflow: that again is a huge challenge, especially for huge organisations. Design that leads to changes in the workflow have to be handled carefully and that’s where designers can often end up getting things wrong.

Well he has not said this in his talk - but workflow has something to do with the culture of an organisation, isn’t it? And that’s not something a mere mortal designer can easily influence, change or tamper with, creatively or otherwise.

With the web, design is a lot more encompassing than print and brings to its fold a range of media and domains; from site structure to navigation to information flow to the more conventional stuff like fonts and colours. Stories have to be designed on the web in ways that are far more complex than these could be in print. Shaping user experience for the web can be quite challenging, mostly because the environment is far more dynamic and keeps changing fast.

Elsewhere, Utko says what news sites can learn from newspaper design is how to get away from the prison of fixed templates. Now, that has a familiar ring to it……let us dump those templates at the deep end of the sea, shall we?!