5 Skills for Web Design Every Designer Should Know to Grow in Your Career

Technically, web design is how we create the interface of our digital products. So, many may argue that all a web designer needs to fulfill their web design jobs is design tools and knowledge that they have already embraced at school. However, things are not that easy. Let’s read on to find out which web design skills you need to be a proper web designer.

The 5 Skills for Web Design Every Designer Should Know

1. Technical skills

1. Color theory

It’s no doubt that color is one of the most important components of every type of design work. Some consider working with colors the most exciting part of the whole process, some are terrified of it because a certain color scheme could make or break a website.

To be more specific, a website’s color scheme plays a big role to help users understand and recognize the brand easier. Furthermore, this element may distinguish your business from others.

That’s why having knowledge of color theory is crucial if you want to be a web designer. Then, how could we make the most of colors in our design?

In web design skills, designers should understand that your website is made to serve the visitors not themselves first. As a result, personal color references should be put aside.

For example, in case your target users are the elderly, the color set of the website should be more contrast to aid navigation.

Secondly, understanding color psychology is needed too. Each and every color is able to encourage users to embrace the brand’s different messages and feelings that the business wants to express. Colors that appeared on a website work this way as well.

Nevertheless, executing this task is not easy when you are a beginner. So we suggest these three tools to pick color schemes for you:

• Palleton
• Coolors
• Canva’s color wheel

Besides, designers should pay attention to the contrast of the web and know how to put colors in the right place.

Recommended reading: 9 Biggest Web Design Mistakes to Avoid That You Should Know

2. Layout – Important web design skills

While colors can drive our feelings and express messages, a layout is more about making a smooth experience.

A good layout makes the content more accessible and intuitive. That’s the thing keeping visitors stay on the site longer and increasing engagement.

However, each type of website has its own ultimate intentions, and designers should base on them to plan the layout. For instance: an e-commerce site needs to emphasize products and its usages; a portfolio website should focus on showcasing one’s works; a blog/online magazine spares spotlights for the content.

One more tip about web design skills for you is that when businesses’ purpose may be different, the process to build a good layout stays the same:

• In Step 1: Define the backbone of your website: main purposes/products/services.
• Step 2: Draft the layout of the website: the mission here is to figure out what content you want to feature and their position on the page.
• In Step 3: Put all elements (text, images, buttons, etc.) together on your layout and adjust them.
• Step 4: Finalize your and product with more detail and be ready to get feedback from others.

Some tools you might need to work with layouts: Mockflow, Responsinator, Screenfly, Browserstack.

Those are two of the most important technical web design skills. Besides, we recommend that you should also learn more about hierarchy, typography, and other web design elements such as buttons, images, etc.

3. Understand the basics of code

Since web design is a sought-after career, with a relatively handsome entry-level web design salary, many people started out their careers as web designers. However, with the rapid development of web development technology, the requirements for web designer skills are getting higher and higher. In addition to being proficient in professional skills, understanding the necessary web development language will have a longer-term benefit for you.

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• Web Server Management

FURTHER READING:

1. How to Create a Web Page for Business to Success?

2. 6 Key Web Design Recommendations and Best Practices

3. 6 Arguments in Favor of a Career in UX/UI Design

2. Analytical skill

Analyzing or defining users’ problems and requirements is considered the most basic task when it comes to design. As the problems are stated, we can base on that to improve the UX and also figure out more ideas for our work.

Most designers just skip the task analysis work and jump to opening their design tools. However, as stated by Joan Hackos, a communication expert, and Janice Redish, a UX consultant, task analysis is good to:

• Understand users’ goals and objectives.
• Draft the detailed process.
• Create nuanced, personal, social, and cultural experiences in your design.

So, at the moment, your question may be how to perform this step precisely. Fortunately, our experts gave us four cores principles to analyze the work:

• The analysis must include understanding users and their environments.
• It is important to analyze users’ goals.
• Task analysis should involve in all stages of the design process.
• Task analysis depends on many different aspects.

Below are some basic steps to process your task analysis:

• Identify the task to be analyzed.
• Break users’ goals down into subtasks.
• Back up your arguments with all the nuances, motivations, and reasons behind them. Please note that it’s important to focus on the causes.
• Get review and feedback from someone who was not involved in the process but has enough experience and knowledge to make sharp criticisms.

3. Critical thinking

Everyone knows that bad stuff happens all the time. Things such as unreasonably negative feedback, awful practices, etc. would show up during your day, especially when you are a web designer and your clients have little to no knowledge of design theory. This is where critical thinking comes to rescue us.

In general, critical thinking is one of the web design skills to improve the way one deals with problems or situations. This technique involves objective evaluation and analysis of the problems, ideas, and issues to reach the ultimate solution. Besides, critical thinking helps designers to justifiably criticize their works.

Recommended reading: UX Design Careers: What You Need to Focus On?

Just like analyzing, critical thinking is not well appreciated by most designers. And this very part will show you how to think critically when working with a design process so that it could go as smoothly as possible.

1. Web design skills – According to Larry Larson

A professor from Ohio, there are 9 principles for critical thinking:

• Collect all the necessary information about the situation in hand
• Understand and clearly, define all terms associated with the situation
• Question the methods used to collect the information and the current conclusions
• Understand the hidden assumptions and biases including your own biases and values
• Question the source of facts
• Don’t expect all the answers
• Look at the big picture of the situation rather than the parts
• Examine the multiple cause and effect
• Watch for thought stoppers

The mission of these guidelines here is to free us from biases, mistakes, as well as inaccuracies and make sure that the issue is identified.

2. And now is the process of critical thinking

• Observe — Give the work more than a quick glance. Look at the whole and the details. More importantly, we have to collect data and available solutions figured by others.
• Question — Keep asking yourself questions based on your observations. Why does the design work? Why doesn’t it work? What are the different parts doing? Are they contributing to the whole? Detracting from it?
• Answer — Think about the answers to all the questions you’re raising. Being right isn’t important. What is important is you think about the answers.

4. Flexibility/learning ability

You may already know that trends are changing every minute. For example, just a second before, brutalism was such a sweetheart of the web design trend. Now it’s gone. Nevertheless, big or small, a certain trend can always affect how we create our design work.

In other words, we must continuously adapt to changes and trends to survive this fierce race in the industry. This is why designers need to be flexible and have the ability to learn things quickly.

However, the trend is not the only thing requiring flexibility and learning ability. Your clients are different, their requirements and problems are different. You cannot treat them as just one person. So the ability to adapt to new or even weird requirements is needed here.

And to possess a flexible mindset, designers must be open-minded, constantly learn and discover new stuff as well as practice frequently.

5. Web Designer Skills for Design Leadership

Then from the aspect of professional skills, the necessary proficiencies of web design skills are as follows:

• UX Design
• Design Tool
• Design Sense
• Adobe Animate
• Graphic Design
• Responsive Design

Recommended reading: UX Design Process: What You Need To Know

Now that we’ve discussed professional and technical web design skills, we should look at adding some soft skills to help keep our web design work more organized.

1. Customer Service

Although customer service is not a technical skill, providing excellent customer service is a requirement in order for a good web designer to win customers and achieve better results.

2. Time management

Whether you are a freelancer or work for a company. Time management skills are important. The rapid updating of project iterations means that the design must also be updated from time to time. Good web designers need to manage their schedules and follow up on project needs.

3. SEO – Very important in web design skills

Once you know SEO, you can use these factors to make the site more attractive to search engines, thus making it easier to find for customers.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is useful for anyone building a website. Web designers and web developers should at least understand the basics of SEO, and that will be a plus for your work.

Recommended reading: How To Outsource SEO & Web Design Processes?

4. Project Management

Project management is a key job skill in almost every industry, and web design is no exception. Good project management skills not only benefit the project but also benefit your career.

We hope this article will give you a better insight into what web design skills a designer should know. And if you are looking for a vendor to realize and make your ideas come true, ping us now!

Designveloper is the leading software development company in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, founded in early 2013 with a team of professional and enthusiastic Web developers, Mobile developers, UI/UX designers, and VOIP experts.