Seven Skills a Web Designer Should Possess

Web design is a constantly evolving field. In 2021, we believe that a web designer needs to have following seven abilities.

Designer

Decision making skills

Most people always doubt themselves when they make a decision; they make a decision and then repeat same decision because doubt creeps in. The ability to make and stick with a decision is what separates those who have energy to make strategic decisions after work is done from those who can't decide what to eat for dinner.

Performance

These core skills, from color theory to typography, user interface and layout, will not only benefit your design practice, but help you think about design at a higher level.

Designers often overlook trees and focus on immediate project rather than big picture.

Despite term, design fundamentals are not universal, it's up to you. For example, should a serif font be combined? Your answer might be “it depends” because you are a great designer, and answer is “no” because for me it is basis of design.

The design guidelines can be limited, but by providing default answers to frequently asked questions, they also free you from broader questions about what you do and why, which will help clarify your purpose.

Trinity Ability

The holy trinity in web design is HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Designers should know enough about them to discuss them at board level.

It's not about frameworks, libraries, or latest build tools, a designer needs to understand building blocks of a website, so if someone asks you if you really need a company logo in your website footer, you can answer with facts to support your answer.

The ability to represent

No matter what area of ​​design you work in, you need to present your ideas to those who don't share your knowledge. Whether you're explaining rationale to a client or explaining your decision to a colleague, just state what you think is best way to get your ideas heard.

Often a persuasive presentation uses principle "less is more". In same way that you complete your design by removing all unnecessary content, you can communicate effectively by removing unnecessary details.

SEO planning capability

SEO (search engine optimization, for two people in world who don't know what that acronym stands for) is a huge field with as many branches as there are UX positions.

There are many SEO aspects to consider when building a website. Technical SEO is what programmers do; if you are not a programmer, you can ignore this. Content search engine optimization is what marketers do; if you are not a marketer, you can ignore this. Strategic SEO is big picture of web plan-site; everyone in every project should know about strategic SEO.

Strategic SEO covers topics such as landing pages, one-page sites, whether you need a blog and, if so, how to use social media. This is so important that it informs people of their earliest location decisions. If you want to do more than just make things pretty, learn more about strategic SEO.

Knowledge of languages

If English isn't your first language, it's a bit easy to learn. You don't need to speak fluently, and you certainly don't need to be poetic, but vast majority of documentation, blog posts, forums, conferences, and Web itself is in English.

Possibility of refusal

If we reject a project or feature request, we won't be asked to do so again, and eventually all of our projects will be ignored until our career is over.

The problem is that there are only a few hours in a day. If we do too much, we end up doing poorly, so there must be limits.