Getting Started As a Web Designer

Every week or so I get an email from someone asking me how I got started in this business and what should they learn and where should they focus their attention

While I don’t consider myself quite an authority on the subject, I’m more than happy to see that people look up to my work and achievements enough to consider me a point of reference and I’m glad I can help and possibly add my small contribution to the development of others. This post is for all those who asked me this type of questions.

As with anything else in this world, if you want to be good at something you must be driven by passion for that subject. Looking to get into the business of designing sites just because it’s cool and it seems to pay well will get you nowhere. So, if you don’t find yourself each day searching the web for those new awesome designs and wonder how they did it and try to analyze them, you’d better stop right now.

You can start by analyzing the work of well-established designers. Aesthetically speaking, try and see what makes their designs look good — it may be the colour scheme, it may be the grid system, it may be the padding and the margins of elements, it may be the typography, or all of these combined. Identify each of these small elements and try to discover why the designer made that particular decision and why should he had gone with another solution it might not have worked as well. Some of the designers I’ve watched along the years include (in no particular order):

• Cameron Moll
• Jason Santa Maria
• Dave Shea
• Dan Cederholm
• Shaun Inman
• Jon Hicks
• Douglas Bowman
• Todd Dominey

You can also check out some of the many design galleries out there for fresh sites, such as:

• Stylegala
• Netdiver
• CSS Beauty

If you’re seeking hard knowledge (and you should), there are plenty of free quality resources out there that should provide a solid starting point. One of the aspects where I’ve seen a lot of young web designers fail is usability. Design just for the sake of design doesn’t generally belong on the web; here it serves a well defined purpose — to complement and facilitate access to information, nothing more, nothing less. Before actually starting in the business, you should read ALL of Jakob Nielsen’s Alertboxes. There are also some other sites that you may want to bookmark and browse through their older content regarding usability:

• Boxes and Arrows
• GUUUI
• InfoDesign
• xBlog: Usability

I also strongly recommend reading Steve Krug’s “Don’t make me think”. It’s just one of those books that will really open your eyes.

Now that you’ve got some idea on how to design a site, you should look into how to bring it to life, coding it, that is. The best guides on HTML and CSS that I’ve come across are from HTMLDog. Furthermore, as the code behind a website can be accessed and viewed quite easily, don’t be afraid to look under the hood and discover coding methods used by others.

Read and experiment, learn from your mistakes, then read and experiment some more. You have to get your hands dirty and work a lot if you want to improve. Create sites for yourself, for your friends, for your school, for non-profit organizations, create websites just for fun. Don’t be afraid to ask opinions about your work and embrace constructive criticisms. Join design forums and be an active member. Try to land a job at a well established design agency, even as an intern for the beginning. There’s no sure path to success here — it all depends on you to constantly improve and work hard.

I’ll leave you with some more links to various online web related magazines that will give you some more to read, just in case you haven’t had enough, and there’s never enough in my opinion:

• SitePoint
• Web-Graphics
• xBlog
• Digital Web
• Vitamin
• A List Apart
• Design In-Flight