What Skills Are Required To Be A Web Designer?

The internet is crowded, and an effective website design is often the most valuable asset of a business to help stand out amongst competitors.

Achieving a strong digital presence that attracts attention begins with a highly skilled website designer. 

A great website designer can seamlessly combine striking visuals and content to capture a user’s attention while staying true to the brand and goals of the business. This is no small task and requires a hefty mix of essential skills–both technical and soft skills.

What Technical Skills Does a Web Designer Need?

A skilled website designer knows how to create a website design that is accessible, responsive, and lends itself to an intuitive and easy-to-navigate user experience. It should be visually appealing and elevate a business’s brand.

Achieving all of the requirements for a stand-out website is no small task, but honing these technical skills will set you up for a web design career path.

Visual Design

Visual design is arguably the most important skill set to hone. It gives you the building blocks for a successful career in any type of design, including website design. Choosing this career path will require a strong understanding of visual design.

Here are the key factors of visual design principles to consider:

Composition 

A website designer should understand the composition. This includes grid systems, balance, emphasis and scale, the rule of thirds, the rule of odds, and more.

A well-composed design is the foundation of any website. Composition rules were meant to be broken to have a greater impact on the viewer, but having a deep understanding of design structure and general rules will strengthen your designs immensely. 

This is especially true of website design. Website developers always contend with different browser sizes, accessibility considerations, and more. A proper design structure will allow a static layout to translate well to a live website across multiple platforms and screen sizes.

Typography and Spacing

Typography is a major part of design and is often one of the more difficult things to get right as a designer. A strong typeface can magically transform simple copy into an impact statement and gives tone to a brand or webpage. 

Spacing is almost as important when considering typography as choosing the right font. Designers should understand positive and negative space, how each letter relates, and the proper spacing to avoid the design feeling unfinished or overcrowded. 

Typographic Hierarchy

Typographic hierarchy uses size, font, and layout to create organization within a design to draw the viewer’s eye to different areas based on importance. 

Creating different sizes, headings, shapes, and blocks of text in website design is extremely useful for getting specific results. You can use a typographic hierarchy to encourage users to complete a call to action or draw their attention further down the page. 

Color Theory / Color Psychology

The color theory consists of guidelines designers use to create visually appealing color schemes. Thanks to Sir Isaac Newton’s invention of the color wheel in 1966, designers have a great tool for creating meaningful, harmonious designs. Remember learning about primary, secondary, and tertiary colors? This is the foundation of color theory.

Designers should know the color wheel and how to effectively use it to reflect the goal of the design while staying true to the brand’s personality. 

Website designers should understand the additive color model and main color schemes such as monochromatic, analogous, complementary, and more. You should have a deeper understanding of color psychology and how to apply color theory to elicit a psychological response positively. You should be able to consider how color temperature will affect the message and overall tone of the website and be able to make recommendations on color palettes based on a brand’s desired message.

Graphic Design and Web Design Software

To be a successful website designer, you must have the right tools. Know how to use industry-standard design software and when to use it.

Make sure you know your way around these tools:

• Adobe Photoshop to edit and optimize images for web

• Adobe Illustrator for creating vector graphics, designing mockups, and designing assets

• Adobe XD for wireframes, prototyping, and user experience and user interface

• InVision is an online whiteboard designer for prototyping and visual collaboration. It can also be used to collect client feedback in an organized way.

• The sketch is a beginner-friendly alternative to Adobe XD for user experience and user interface, currently only available for Mac users.

• Figma is another alternative to Adobe XD for UX and UI.
  There are many other design tools out there, but knowing the relevant Adobe tools and having at least an understanding of Figma or Sketch will be crucial to success. 

UX and UI Skills

User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) are often used interchangeably, but it’s not the case. A website designer knows the difference between the two terms and how they go hand in hand. Effective designers ensure the user feels calm while visiting the website rather than confused or frustrated.

Put simply, UX focuses on the challenges and pain points of the intended audience and how to solve them by looking at the larger picture. Once the UX is plotted out, the UI considers different user touch points along the way to create an aesthetically pleasing experience. You cannot have one without the other, but they are not necessarily the same thing.

An effective website designer will have deep knowledge of web and mobile UX patterns, best practices, and emerging technologies. You should be able to create a persona and anticipate the path a user will take via sitemaps, wireframes, and information architecture. 

Here are some design tools used for UX. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but these tools are a great place to start.

• Slickplan is a collaborative tool and website planning suite that can be used for creating sitemaps.

• Miro is a collaborative whiteboard tool that can be used for workshopping ideas with team members, wireframing, and more.

• Figma is not only an Adobe XD alternative but also a free web-based application that can be used for wireframes and sitemaps.

You will need to be able to sketch out all key parts of a web page, including the interface. This should always be done while keeping the primary goal of the website or web page in mind.

Responsiveness

In today’s digital world, there are countless devices with the capability to connect to the internet, and they all come with different screen sizes. This can create a challenge when designing a website, as it needs to be responsive across all devices and adapt to any screen size. 

Website designers should be able to design using an industry-standard grid system. There are several front-end frameworks, such as Bootstrap, Foundation, and Svelte. As a website designer, you should be familiar with these and when to utilize each one. 

Bootstrap is the most common design technique consisting of a standard 12-column system with rows to ensure your design can adapt across different screens. Bootstrap is commonly used by website developers as well. 

If you are unfamiliar with grid systems specifically for website design, learning Bootstrap is hands down the best place to start, eliminating any cause for concern regarding whether your design will be responsive once it’s live.

HTML and CSS

As a website designer, you should learn at least the fundamentals of HyperText Markup Language  (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to ensure your web designs and layouts can be converted into code.

HTML is the coding language used to structure and organize a website and its content. Think of HTML as the bones or skeleton of a website, it is the structural layer upon which the entire site is built.

CSS is used to inform browsers how to style and format the HTML. It allows you to adjust colors, fonts, backgrounds, and more. While HTML provides the skeleton of a website, CSS is the presentation layer used for appearance, look, and feel. 

The idea that website designers need to know how to front-end code has been a controversial topic over the last decade or two, but the majority opinion is that website designers should at least have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS and how to write it if needed.

Being able to communicate with developers and understand how they will be able to translate your design to code is an essential skill for every website designer. Knowing the fundamentals of CSS and HTML will likely make your developer your new best friend, and it will save time for everyone in the long run. 

Accessibility

If you are not designing your website with accessibility in mind, you could miss out on a huge portion of your audience. Some website viewers may be unable to consume your design and content due to a disability. 

Studies show that 56.7 million Americans (18.7% of the U.S. population) have some type of disability (Interactive Accessibility). These days, more and more businesses are subjected to lawsuits due to inaccessible websites. Make sure your website designs are protected from litigation by becoming an expert in designing for accessibility or by hiring an accessibility expert to scan your website design before launch.

Here are some things to keep in mind when designing an accessible website:

• Color contrast should be sufficient to differentiate text, buttons, and other elements from the background. There are several color contrast checkers available, such as Web Aim, Stark Plugin, and Contrast Ratio

• Content elements should be differentiated by more than just color to account for color-blind users.

• Font size should be large enough for visually impaired users to read easily. Take special consideration for body font size. 

• Navigation menus, links, and buttons should be clear, descriptive, and easily distinguishable from the rest of the site

This list is just the beginning of what a website designer should keep in mind for accessibility, and the requirements may change in the future. Website designers should study and stay up to date on emerging requirements surrounding website accessibility.

What Soft Skills Does a Web Designer Need?

Time Management 

Managing time and hitting deadlines properly are crucial skills for any website designer. Websites cannot be developed until the design phase is completed, and as a designer, it will be your responsibility to ensure you stay on track with timelines.

Website designers often find themselves juggling multiple projects at a time, and the ability to prioritize projects properly is an essential skill. Your project manager will thank you if you can master this.

Communication

Good communication skills are extremely valuable as a website designer. Communicating your design choices to clients accurately will reduce the amount of feedback, revisions, and time spent bringing their vision to life.

Strong communication creates a smoother path to getting design sign-off and moving projects into development. Understanding what your client is looking for by knowing the right questions to ask and when to push back comes with experience, and as a website designer, you should always be learning and improving in this project. 

Problem-solving 

A website designer should be able to work effectively and creatively to solve problems. Designing is not always cut and dry; it requires thinking outside the box and adapting your work to meet the project’s needs. 

Being able to imagine solutions for design issues and problems will help you arrive at better decisions and has the potential to transform a great website design into an outstanding design. 

Pro Tip: Try not to emotionally attach to your design, especially if it’s the first draft. Detaching emotionally means you can effectively solve problems from a bird’s eye view and understand the perspective of others, especially your client. Adopting this mindset will get you far on a website designer career path.

Teamwork and Research 

While some website designers do it all–manage the project, communicate with the client, create the design, and implement it–most website designers will be working on a team at some point during their careers. 

Be a team player. You should be able to graciously accept critiques and explain your reasoning behind design decisions to other crucial team members. Compromise can be tough, but negative feedback shouldn’t be a blow to your ego. 

No one wants to work with a website designer that is stubborn or unwilling to collaborate. Don’t be that person. It’s ok if team members don’t love your design as much as you do.  

Research emerging design trends and brands you are working with and come up with useful findings. Be open to sharing your findings with the team. Everyone can benefit from mastering Google and research skills, and this is especially true of web designers.

Attention to Detail and Organization

Website design is all about the little details. Designers should be able to consider subtle style effects, alignment when embellishing or keeping it simple, and countless other seemingly small details.

Will a mega menu look better with a small drop shadow? Should your text be aligned in the center or to the right? Should the heading font have a heavy or medium weight? These are the types of questions you should be asking yourself, and be comfortable answering them. Think about the details throughout the entire course of the project, not just at the end. This ability will set you apart. 

The organization is one of the most important skills, and it helps keep details in mind. Know how to properly organize your folders for development handoff and keep track of the latest versions of your design. Find and adopt a naming convention that works for you and your team. Many designers add V1, V2, or FNL to file names to keep everything well-organized and easy to access.