Web Designers Roadmap - A Beginners Guide

Web designer Roadmap: Save So you’ve decided on a career as a web designer? After all, why not? Working in this creative field means you’ll be at the crossroads of cutting-edge technology, user experience design, and marketing trends. In the twenty-first century, web design is an interesting and in-demand profession. It can also pay well, but you’ll find that you’ll need a lot of job experience and a large customer portfolio to make a lot of money. The path to becoming a web designer can be winding and winding. As a result, you may be unsure where to find out information on the best and most effective path to your future goal. Should you really try to learn to code? Will watching many of the many instructive videos on web design that are widely available on the Internet be enough to enable you to get work as a web designer, or should you make a significant investment in a formal web design education? We’ve decided to put together a step-by-step tour of what you’ll need to do to become a web designer because there are so many inquiries about one of the trendiest careers and jobs in the 21^st century.

What is a Web Designer?

What is the role of a web designer? A web designer, in a nutshell, is a designer who generates digital elements for a website. A web designer’s purpose is to focus on a website’s general aesthetic and layout structure. A web designer may also work on the web content that appears on a site.

The look of the website includes the graphics, typeface, and colors used. The aesthetics of a website are grouped according to the layout structure. Less is always more when it comes to designing a beautiful site design. Excellent web design layouts are frequently simple to use and effectively represent a business.

Users like unique web design layouts because they are visually appealing. In order for a website to be user-friendly, successful webpage layouts are usually made to be simple to use. Users are unlikely to return to a website if the design is not user-friendly. Web designers strive for a good user interface (UI) on their sites since it eliminates the chance of user annoyance.

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How to become a web designer

If you are interested in pursuing a career as a web designer, try following these steps:

1. Develop the necessary skills

To become a web designer, you need to be proficient in the technical aspects of building websites. While you can earn a college degree to pursue web design—such as an associate's or bachelor's degree in computer programming or graphic design—many web designers are self-taught. There are subject-specific courses available online that you can use to develop your skills. The most necessary skills for being a web designer include:

Visual design

Visual design is the art of selecting the right design principles to boost the look and enhance the feel of a website. Web Designers with advanced visual designing skills tend to do extremely well. Visual design is closely linked to user experience, only that it’s more related to the esthetic elements.

The most common tools used in visual designing are grid systems, spacing typography, color psychology, and type hierarchy.

UX

The user experience (UX) of a website can be described as the feeling visitors have during their end-to-end interaction with your website. UX is one of the most crucial factors in defining a website’s success, especially as design philosophy becomes increasingly user-focused.

A Web Designer who understands UX practices will always approach his designs from a user-first perspective. Conducting research is a crucial part of the UX process, and then using those insights to improve things like navigation, content, colors, and so on.

Design software

Like any other professional, you need the right tools to get the job done. You should definitely familiarize yourself with all the industry-standard design software. Tools like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Sketch are ones that almost all Designers use for important parts of their job like creating mockups, designing logos and images, and of course, modifying and enhancing photos.

A good Web Designer should learn how to use them.

Programming languages

Most web designers need at least some knowledge of basic programming languages, such as HTML, CSS, PHP, jQuery, JavaScript, and Flash. Freelancers need more coding knowledge, while web designers employed with an agency will likely work on a team that includes programmers and graphic designers.

Search engine optimization

Understanding SEO techniques will help a web designer create sites that appear prominently when users search for certain keywords or topics.

Web design theory

There are certain foundational principles for creating excellent websites, such as structure, user experience, and color theory. If you don't attend college, you can still study this theory on your own by reading books on the subject or doing research online.

2. Learn Key Web Design Tools

Communication skills

Web designers need excellent communication skills to understand a client's needs and want, correctly implement the client's desires, and suggest their own ideas for a site.

Before you can get up and running as a Web Designer, you’ll need to learn an array of web design tools. Over time, better and more powerful web design software and tools have been developed and released, and as a result, Web Designers have never been in a better position to create beautiful and functional websites.

If you want to be a Web Designer, we recommend you learn the following tools:

WordPress

The longtime leader of all web design skills hasn’t lost any of its popularity. WordPress powers 27 percent of all the Internet’s websites and owns a stunning 76 percent market share around the world in CMS. WordPress boasts over 1,000 built-in themes and plugins that will allow you to easily build, edit, customize, enhance, and optimize websites.

InVision Studio

Even though WordPress is still overall most popular, InVision Studio is considered by many Web Designers to be the best overall tool for designing a website thanks to its array of features and rapid prototyping. With gestures and interactions like clicking, swiping, and hovering, you can also create custom transitions and animation.

Photoshop

Web Designers need to be able to make eye-catching and creative images — that’s why Photoshop is without a doubt the most crucial Adobe suite for Web Designers. Its limitless array of color options and different gradients give you everything you’ll need to put together dazzling patterns and prints.

Dreamweaver

Another part of the Adobe suite that Web Designers should get familiar with, Dreamweaver allows you to directly code your website design even if you’re not a programming pro. Ready-made design templates and other tools are especially helpful for newcomers who still want to put together an attractive, responsive design.

Sketch

Typically used mainly for user interface designs, Sketch is an essential tool for creating interfaces and prototyping. When you’re working with vector drawings and graphics, Sketch can make life a lot easier.

Google Web Designer

Google Web Designer will empower you to make compelling, visually stunning HTML5 content. To give your creative vision life, Google Web Designer allows you to use animation and interactive elements and integrates seamlessly with other Google products, including Google Ads and Google Drive.

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3. Work on Your Own Projects to Develop Your Web Design Skills

Now that you’ve stocked your web design tool belt, you’re ready to begin building websites. As you go, you’ll likely pick up a lot of skills you might not have expected. Some of these are technical skills, or “hard” skills, like programming in HTML, CSS, or even JavaScript. The best way to sharpen these skills is just to get started – the more sites you build, the better you’ll be.

There are also a number of user experience design skills that are useful for Web Designers to consider. Web Designers program the screens that users interact with – and they can be far more successful with a good grasp of user-centered design and responsive design.

As you build sites, try to interact with them the way a user might. Where are the pain points or navigational issues? How could the site be improved? Now you’re in the mindset of a UX Designer, and that’s going to be key to designing really solid web products.

4. Apply to Relevant Web Design Jobs

Begin your web design career by performing web design jobs to add to your site and portfolio and gain experience so you can earn more clients. You can search for job listings online if you want to work for an agency or use freelancing platforms to bid for opportunities.

There are many roles within the web design field. Someone with web design skills and the right mix of education and experience could ultimately be qualified for any of the following jobs:

• Web Designer
• Front-End Developer
• Front-End Designer
• UX/UI Designer
• Product Manager
• Visual Designer
• Interaction Designer
• Mobile Developer

5. Build your portfolio

As you gain clients, create websites, and become more experienced, keep an updated portfolio of your work and skills. Include examples of your work, positive client feedback, and a list of your design capabilities. You should have a version of the portfolio that you can email to potential clients and also keep the portfolio updated on your personal website.

6. Market yourself

If you want to be a freelance web designer, your success will depend partly on your ability to market yourself as well as your skills. While keeping your personal website and portfolio updated is a good start, find additional ways to make yourself known in the design community and to potential clients.

Use social media and professional profiles to increase your visibility. You can communicate with other web designers online to stay updated on industry news and job opportunities. Build positive relationships with your clients to ensure their repeat business and ask them to recommend you, and attend networking events to continue to develop your contacts.

7. Consider specializing

If you focus on a particular niche of website design, you may be able to earn recognition for your skills and gain more clients. Consider specializing in a certain area of web design, such as sites for e-commerce, mobile apps, or sites for specific types of businesses.

8. Stay updated

Web design is a constantly evolving field, as technology changes frequently, new design methods are created and consumer needs change. Keep learning, practicing, and developing your skills to remain current in your industry and prove to clients that you have the knowledge and skills necessary to build websites that fill their needs.

Web Design Resources You'll Actually Want to Use & Bookmark  

Fonts

• Identify any font with What Font Is
• RightFont is a professional font manager app for Mac to help designers preview & manage font files
• Access a library of 990+ free licensed fonts at Google Fonts
• Get free commercial fonts at Font Squirrel
• DaFont has tons of downloadable fonts 
• One of the biggest collections of fonts

Icons

• Access packs of icon bundles for your next project at Round Icons
• Find beautifully crafter symbols for common actions and items at Material Design
• Find free icons, mockups and templates at Uplabs
• IconFinder is the leading search engine and market place for vector icons in SVG, PNG, CSH and AI format
• Flaticon is the largest search engine of free icons in the world 

Color Palettes

• At Contrast Grid, you can test many foreground and background color combos for compliance
• Find variations of a color with 0 to 255
• Create a color palette from a specific image with PaletteGenerator
• Coolors is a super fast color scheme generator
• Choose your favorite colors and get your Material Design palette generated and downloadable

Images

• Storyblocks has royalty-free stock images, video and audio
• Find over 1.7 million+ high quality free images and royalty free stock and images at Pixabay 
• Unsplash features beautiful, free images and photos you can download and use for any project
• Find stock images, photos, vectors videos and music at Shutterstock
• Explore 300,000+ free stock photos and royalty free images at Free Images

Image Optimizers

• Compress PNG for…wait for it….compressing PNG files
• Compress JPEG for compressing JPEG files (shocker!)
• Use Smush for compressing images inside of WordPress
• You can optimiz 4 different file types with Compressor
• Kraken adds more flexibility for optimizing images 

Lorem Ipsum Generators

• Cupcake Ipsum is a sugar-coated lorem ipsum generator
• Lorem Ipsum generator with origins and meaning
• Office Ipsum is a dummy copy for the corporate world
• Find all the ipsums in one place at Meet the Ipsums
• Learn about lorem ipsum and generate dummy text at Lipsum 

Favicon Generators

• Real Favicon Generator is a favicon generator for perfect icons on all browsers
• Use Favicon.cc to create and generate favicons including animated ones
• With Genfavicon you can turn any image into a favicon for your website
• Favic-o-Matic lets you upload an image or use the platform’s icons to create a favicon
• Xiconeditor is an easy, free tool for designing a favicon from scratch

Placeholder Images

• Place Holder is a free image placeholder service for web designers featuring billions of images
• Just as it sounds, the Dynamic Dummy Image Generator will generate dummy images with options including height, width, background color and more.
• Lorem Picsum is an easy to use, stylish placeholders using images from Unsplash
• Choose size, colors and text and generate images with a URL with Fake Images Please
• At Lorem Pixel use random images of a specific width and height in a variety of categories 

Browser Extensions

• What Font is the easiest way to identify fonts on web pages.
• CSS Peeper is a smart CSS viewer tailored for designers
• Detect the different technologies any website uses with Wappalyzer
• Web Developer is a toolbar with various helpful web developer tools 
• Grab a color from any website with the advanced eyedropper, color picker and color analyzer using ColorZilla 

Are Web Designers in Demand?

As it’s become more and more clear that the design and useability of a company’s web offerings are absolutely crucial to its bottom line, the demand for talented Web Designers has continued to rise at a feverish pace across every industry.

As a result, there’s no shortage of jobs available for skilled Web Designers — according to the BLS, employment of Web Developers is projected to grow 13 percent from 2018 to 2028, much faster outpacing the five percent average for all jobs.

Web Designers who can code are in a separate class – especially if they also have a bit of knowledge around the back end. A Web Designer who knows his or her way around programming languages like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, and Python will really stand out from the pack and also command a much higher salary. That’s why many working Web Designers wind up attending web development boot camps to round out their skill sets.

UX (User Experience) skills are also extremely valuable for a Web Designer to acquire. Mastering UX design fundamentals, design research and strategy, responsive design, user research, UI design, and how to provide visualizations would make you the total package as a Web Designer and very valuable addition to any company.

Salary for a Web Designer

The average salary for a Web Designer is $50,632 plus around $5,000 of other bonuses and perks, according to PayScale.

That number rises with experience. The average Senior Web Designer takes home $71,201 plus nearly $10,000 in bonuses, and salaries range up to $100,000.

Happy Coding.... ☺️

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