It can be intimidating to start a new career path, especially in a field such as web design. It takes a lot of technical knowledge and skills to become a web designer. You want to be sure that you will succeed in your new career before investing the time and effort needed to hone your skills. The fact is that web development, although challenging, is not “difficult”, like being a doctor or a lawyer.
You can get a lot of what you need to know for yourself and in a relatively short time, especially if you just want to focus on the front-end. As soon as you learn those basic skills that web designers and developers alike need, such as HTML and CSS, you'll be much closer to discovering the technology career that will be perfect for you. This involves learning both front-end and back-end skills so that you can not only design a website using skills like HTML and Javascript, but also create that site and make sure it will work properly. For example, if a web designer were building a theme park, they would love to focus first on the overall theme park “vibe”, the design, and the way a visitor would experience it, before going into details such as the colors, shapes, and names of the attractions.
Having a natural aptitude in design and technology can be essential to help you continue learning in this career. Even inexperienced people can learn the basic framework of HTML, CSS, Javascript and web design in a few months. The best way to make a lot of money AND to be able to offer what customers and employers want most is to be a complete package of designer and programmer magic. Others find design more difficult because they think it requires more innate (rather than learned) creativity and learning to use design software.
Cristy also points out that “Nowadays, some designers can do both design and coding and many freelancers do both. Web designers also tend to rely on intuition and feeling, as they spend a lot of time developing the look and feel of websites and user interfaces. If you're like me, you've probably been socialized to define “web designer” and “web developer” in ways that don't represent what it really is to be one, and you haven't even spoken to a real-life web designer or developer. My biggest misconceptions about designers and developers had to do with how much money they make, how steep the learning curve is, and what kind of work they actually do.
Whether you're interested in learning web design to work as a freelancer or for a company, you'll need to be aware of your schedule and projects to be a successful web designer. If they can understand basic HTML and CSS, they know how to deliver a design that a developer can code. We also have a more specific Visual Designer course that covers everything from color theory and typography to becoming a master of Photoshop. Once you've started and you start creating real experience with design and code, it's much easier to decide which career path is right for you.
