I just read a great post by Ben Hunt on Web Design from Scratch, ‘10 Top Skills for Web Design, in order of importance‘. Here is his list:
- Writing & editorial
- Holistic circumspection
- Graphic design theory
- Listening & discernment
- Self-learning
- SEO
- Graphic design: original/creative graphics
- Web page production in HTML/CSS
- Business sense
- Typing
A couple of snippets I liked:
I’m convinced the #1 most important skill for a web designer is the ability to use words effectively. A truly effective web designer is more highly skilled with writing and editing copy than with producing graphics in Photoshop.
Writing skills are also much rarer in the world of web design, which is good news for me, Ben Hunt and you, prospective client!
Web design is one of the richest, most diverse domains you can choose. It’s a giant pile-on of visual design, technology, psychology, coding, human factors, all that jazz. And the technology doesn’t stand still from one day so the next. That’s what makes it so frustrating – and so fun! One thing’s for sure. If you want to perform well in this mental soup, you’ve got to be capable of learning on a daily basis. You need to pick up new styles, new techniques, and new constraints every time you sit down to work.
I haven’t read a better summary of the multi-faceted world of web design – and the reasons it appeals to me – than the first two sentences of this quotation. It’s exactly this mixing – of business stuff with human stuff, graphic design with code – that means it’s never dull. Most people regard ‘web design’ as one of the following:
- a weird Hoxtonite practice for people with funny hairstyles, indy specs and beards.
- a black art involving impenetrable ‘coding’ (a friend recently believed me when I told her I could read binary code).
- IT
But really it’s about providing for people’s appetite for information. The web has grown so fast, and the domain of web design is now so broad, that, as Ben points out, ‘there’s no one who can teach you everything’. As a web designer, the best you can do is to keep learning and share knowledge and expertise with others – in the hope of keeping pace with the pile-on.