[fryke]

Well... Yeah, but it's not really an answer to the _original_ question.

I'd say that "web design" (not web development, the question was design...) at its very beginning wasn't really a design job for graphics designers. You simply _couldn't_ design much. The Mac-using graphics designers _I_ know of the early times had a problem with this. They wanted to replace as much of the pages they designed with pictures. But that was a problem for the web, which was very slow as soon as you had to load a lot of pix. (Well, it's still much better if you use text and code instead of images today, but with CSS etc. we have a lot more "designable" code.)

Before there were WYSIWIG HTML-editors, designing web pages often was a three step process. A designer (most probably on a Mac) desigend something in Photoshop and Illustrator/FreeHand. Then the webdesigner told the graphics designer to *NOT* base everything on 300 dpi but on 72 dpi. Then the graphics designer quit the contract. Just kidding. But I guess it's part of the truth. Designers had to adapt to the new medium or they would rather stay with print. Classic webdesign was more of a code/hack/design-appropriately-to-the-medium kind of job.