In most cases, art-directed designs are fueled purely by the ambition and
determination of their creators. Such designs are predominantly found on
freelance websites (being the fruit of personal projects) and rarely found in
corporate settings. The main obstacle to wider adoption of these
techniques is that the creation of such designs (or rather their
implementation with (X)HTML and CSS) is time-consuming. Art-directed
layouts are quite difficult to code and maintain, and they often require
inline CSS styling, or else designers would end up with dozens of un-
semantic classes in their style sheets. Also, integrating advertisements on
these pages is difficult because they put constraints on the designer’s
layout. So, at the moment, these designs are more appropriate for less
frequently updated websites because of the overhead.
If you decide to experiment with art-directed design, be aware that the
layout of an article should be secondary and always support the content
itself, not dominate it. The problem is that once you start designing a blog
post, it’s easy to over-design page elements just because you can, not
because the content dictates it. In fact, the design community is having an
ongoing debate on whether art-directed designs are merely “over-
Photoshopped articles,” designed purely for the sake of design.
Good design is about effective communication, not decoration at the
expense of legibility. As Francisco Inchauste puts it, “I think it’s a ‘pick two’
sort of scenario. The choices are: great content, great art direction and
regular schedule. If you try to hit all three, one of those will begin to fall
short.” Bottom line: Web designs that are heavily influenced by print design
are beautiful, but only when the techniques support your article.