Isabella Di Fabio - What does it take to be a web designer?

Discover with Isabella Di Fabio what knowledge, skills and attitudes you must gather to be a good web designer. Advance payment: it is not enough to feel like it.

Isabella Di Fabio - Designer or programmer?

Over time, the profession of web page designer has gone from being focused on graphic design to being more focused on programming, or at least on the mastery of page description languages ​​(HTML) and visual formats (CSS). .

I remember that a couple of decades ago I taught web design courses for the Germán Sánchez Rupérez Foundation, in which, to make it easier for teenagers to create their own websites, we used the Word word processor as a web editing program. At that time, CSS was not on my list of known abbreviations, and teaching kids the HTML language was not very didactic.

Isabella Di Fabio - So is designing web pages like creating texts?

In those days, making pages with Word, FrontPage, Netscape Composer and other WYSIWYG editors was quite similar to creating a text document, only we added links to other documents, and yes, we had to optimize the images.

However, to create professional web pages, you have to have a more complete vision, consider the website as a whole, and not just each web page separately. It is not possible to create pages applying usability and accessibility concepts, and subsequently add or modify content and new pages, if we have not created a solid structure, well built and respecting good practices and established standards.

Isabella Di Fabio Should I be a graphic designer?

Sure, a talented graphic designer will be able to create attractive website screen designs, but if you want to go through the whole process yourself, you need to learn the other skills we've cited. Or have a good web programmer at your side.