Any professional web designers out there?

My 15 year old nephew has spent the last couple of years learning about web design. It is his dream to become a professional web designer. He knows HTML, PHP and MySql very well. All he uses is notepad. To the best of my knowledge he’s never used Photoshop or Illustrator. His knowledge of javascript is minimal at this point in time.

What specific skills or knowledge is necessary to become a professional web designer?

He’s gotta know photoshop. Other than that, CSS is very important, and flash is a good idea.

He should study user interface, information architechture, marketing and basic design. Must have Photoshop. He may want perl for webhosts who don’t support PHP. If he codes in notepad he’s off to a good start, but I suggest Homesite for its robust find-and-replace capability. Dreamweaver and Flash would be good since so many people look for that.

Good books to start:

Creating Killer Web Sites: The Art of Third-Generation Site Design <–good starter for design, if dated
Web Navigation: designing the user experience
Secrets of Successful Websites
Designing Web Usability : The Practice of Simplicity
Deconstructing Web graphics
Don’t Make Me Think! A Commonsense Approach to Web Usability

He’s gotta know photoshop. Other than that, CSS is very important, and flash is a good idea.

I’m no major propellerhead nor yet a design Da Vinci, but I’ve got a nice little business nonetheless. That said:

What he should know depends on what kind of designer he wants to be. He doesn’t need to know anything artistic, for example. In fact, if he has no “artistic” eye or aspirations to same, he can partner with someone who sucks at code but can rock Photoshop or Illustrator or Fireworks or what have you. (I disagree here with MrFantsyPants – heh, that screenname is oddly appropriate – in that I don’t think that Photoshop is mandatory at all).

I think there are too many web designers out there who try to do it all. Jack of all trades, master of none, as they say! Developing a website demands many different skills, and it’s a wise wannabe who focuses on his or her area of interest/talent and becomes an expert – only then hooking up with someone who compliments his/her skillset. IOW, great at graphics but not so hot at coding? Find a web wonk. Live for HTML but uninterested in color scheming? Get a graphics guru.

Otherwise you get either coders creating bland, templatey sites with technical gizmos up the wazoo that can’t take away from the fugly colors, or artists creating pages filled to the rafters with gorgeous but bloated images backed by craptastic, sloppy coding.

In other words, 95% of current websites. :wink: Okay, I exaggerate. Maybe.

So what does your son really need? Actually, I think he has a great basic package right now. In addition, I definitely agree with MrFantsyPants that CSS is vital. Add javascript and Perl, as well as XML and DHTML. And even if he does partner with a graphics artist, he should learn to create basic images from a program such as Photoshop, Fireworks, Illustrator, and so on. (You never know when you might need a button in a hurry!) But Flash? Very very unnecessary. (Apologies again, MFP!) It’s fun to play with, but I wouldn’t concentrate much time on it.

Moving beyond those tech-y things, there are more broad topics to consider:

  • Of course, he should learn the basics of layout and color scheming.

  • Usability is important too, although some web designers scoff at purists such as Jakob Nielsen who may be excessively strict. (But IMHO it’s better to start out erring on the side of usability than to end up getting pissed off at your users who complain that they can’t read that super-cool microsized screen font you fell in love with.)

  • Site promotion/search engine optimization issues are sort of an off-shoot of the tech stuff, since there are many ways that coding can affect how one’s sites are seen by search engines and directories.

  • Depending on the client base he hopes to attract, I think he’d be well advised to learn about ecommerce options such as shopping carts and other types of payment systems.

  • Then there are the business issues that will crop up. He’ll want to learn about webhosting services, advertising, freelance contracts, billing, networking, and customer relations. Of course many of the specifics depend on whether he’s planning on opening a freelance business or working in a design shop.

Welp, those are just a few ideas off the top of my head. You’ll probably get as many different answers as there are web designers. :slight_smile: Please wish your son lots of luck, and feel free to drop me a line if I can be of any help!

Standards, standards, standards. Anyone who says “Just make it work in IE” gets a boot in the posterior from me.

Learning how to be a web developer isn’t hard; learning how to be a good web developer is the trick.

I see Photoshop being mentioned a lot here, and along those lines I’d just like to add a book or copurse in basic layout and design would help a lot as well.

It’s all good and well to have Photoshop skills, but it will come in very handy to have a basic grasp on layouts and basic (classic) design elements & rules.

In a reciently previous life I WAS a webmaster (I’ve since moved on into security.)

You’re getting a rather biased response (not unexpected for this demographic…and it’s not a condemnation, just a recognition of what the folks here know.)

There arre three major paths you can take, they have a common component or two:

HTML, CSS (and, MAYBE dhtml/javascript) - these are key, and will work everywhere.

Now, on the Mac side of the shop, I’ll go with the photoshop/dreamweaver/apache/perl/php list…

If he’s staying in Open Source and short of funds, I’d stick with The GIMP, apache, perl, php. For light web centric art, The Gimp is every bit as powerful as photoshop. (and also available on the Mac if money is a concern)

On the wintel side of the shop: Frontpage/Photodraw/.NET/IIS/.asp-.aspx coding.

IF he’s handling the look and feel of the site, he still needs to be aware of the things that make a site maintainable/fast/user friendly. These things are common, reguardless of the theology/technology/brands.

My web library is aging, but I’d also check out the book by Philip Greenspun. It’s an OSS technology based look at web design.

Professionally, I used the Microsoft products due to HAVING a budget for hardware and software, My personal stuff has started out on Windows 2003/IIS 6 and is slowly migrating to apache2 since I changed over to the mac as a personal machine. It’s led me to realize that there are three kinds of people:

  1. people who don’t know
  2. people who evangelize their theology as the One True Way (bigots)
  3. The very few people that realize the message is the same, reguardless of the tools used to develop the message. (People that didn’t have the luxury to be bigoted)

He’s picked several very good foundations, he’ll be most efficient learning that path…he’s be much more MARKETABLE if he then learns how to do it other ways.

A designer creates the visual look of the site, and often nothing more, a developer creates all the code that makes the site functional. Infact I think it is preferable if people are more specialized.

When creating a site for clients the work usually follows this pattern and each of these are different jobs handled by different people.

Graphic Design: A Graphic in Photoshop, Fireworks or another program.

Web Design: Turning the graphic into a web page template by slicing the image then using css, html, & javascript.

Web Development: Coding of dynamic elements such as database driven content, or other dynamic content using the template from the web designer.
Here are some of the specialists that may also work on a web site.

Flash/Multimedia designer: Design animations or other flash content

Flash programmer: Programs flash (creating games, or other dynamic/interactive elements).

Database Administrator: Creates databases, tables, and stored proceedures for manipulating data.

Technical Writer / Marketing: Creates product descriptions, writes copy for the web site.

Data Entry and Content Management: The person making updates, adding new plain text pages, etc.

It all depends on the route he wants to go - because he may not know that beyond the title of Web Designer is a pletora of options.

Considering his php/mysql and hand coding of html, maybe he should become a web developer instead - and for that he might want to take a course, or go to university for computer science so that he knows both the *nix side (php/mysql) and the windows side (asp/.net) and has more options open to him finding work.

Once he is a programmer, he can very easily find designers to work with quite easily and work independantly, or get a job at a marketing company, design shop, or almost anywhere that has a large intranet (such as manufacturing/telmecommunications/oil & gas).

I’ve got to respectfully disagree for one reason. What you say only holds true if you’re in a self-employed situation. However, if you’re looking for a job in a company as an in-house designer, you very likely will need to have at least be moderately skilled at photoshop et al. If company X is looking for one person to be their ‘web guy/gal’, saying, “well, I don’t really do graphics-related programs” isn’t going to help your chances much. I couldn’t do my job right now without some strong photoshop skills, even though I’m not a ‘graphic-designer’ by job title or training.

I’ll be seeing him tonight and will bring a print out of all your suggestions. As for now, I’d say at this point in time he is most interested in the actual coding, but he does have an eye for design and I will point out the benefits of learning Photoshop or GIMP. Any and all information, suggestions, and insights are very much appreciated. As I said, he is only 15, but is very determined to make this his future and I’m sure it will be along along the lines of web developer or web design.

Good advice all around.

I would stress that there are designers and programmers. Needs analysis is CRITICAL.

At my job, I get to do all three.

From my Boss…“Just make it work .”

That’s OK… To a point. Then, when they see that they may have more input besides “make it blue, not green”. Well then the shit hit’s the fan for me.

“Oh, you can make it blue? How about another frame over here? And a pop up for this. And when you do this, have it do that. I saw this the other day, can you do that?”

Scope creep.

It’s great to know how to code it, as long as you have a destination. If the destination changes while you write the code, it’s not always easy to change paths.

All other opinions aside, this one is probably the most important in this thread.

And, in the case of Flash, it’s often rather unfortunate that they do.

The number of crappy Flash-based sites and Flash gimmicks out there is just too depressing.

Tools, languages, etc can all be learned by someone who knows what they are doing. Design, flow, requirements, useability are IMO the real valuable skills. Right now there are several tools that are key (CSS, Photoshop, etc) but by the time your 15 year old is old is out looking for a real job, I can guarentee that they will have changed.

The ability to look at a design and see whether it works never goes away.