Depending on who you ask, it seems like web designers do everything these days. That’s because the term “web designer” is often used as a blanket label for anyone who builds a website.
But the reality is a little more complicated than that. Building a website requires a lot of planning, content creation (SEO), artistic effort, coding, and hiring professionals. Web designers are one of those professionals, but they usually have a very specific role in the process. If you’re planning to become a web designer in the future, or even if you’re considering hiring one, you should first familiarize yourself with exactly what they do and don’t do. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your time and money. With that in mind, let’s talk about the typical tasks of a web designer and their role in the website building process.
Website design refers to the aesthetic appearance of a web page, which includes how content is arranged and design elements are implemented. Web designers typically focus on something called the “front-end,” the part of a website that directly interacts with and is visible to users (as opposed to the “back-end” code that makes the website work).
This means that web designers can choose everything from images and photos, fonts and shapes, color schemes, buttons, and how these elements are placed together. They use design software (like Photoshop or Sketch) to create mockups or visual previews to show what they have in mind for the final website design.
From this, it can be concluded that web designers typically have no role in creating the functionality of a website. They focus only on the visual design part. Writing the code that makes a website work is the responsibility of developers, developing a website requires a different set of skills and sensibilities than website design.
What is the role of a web designer in the website building process?
To better understand the exact task of a web designer, we should briefly review the most common roles in the website creation process.
- Website Planner: Conducts in-depth marketing research to determine the business objectives of the entire website and its individual pages.
- Graphic Designer: Visual brand elements (logo, color scheme, typography) and graphic resources (illustrations and icons) that are used to build the website.
- Advertising Content Specialist: Creates all written content—from headlines to body copy to button text—throughout the website.
- UX3 Designer: Focuses on user needs and designing the skeleton of the website page (called the front-end), designing website elements based on user behaviors and expectations.
- UI5 Designer: Designs interactive elements like buttons and forms.
- Web Designer: Focuses on all visual elements of a website, and turning the front-end designs into completed web page designs.
- Front-end Developer: Uses markup and coding languages (HTML, CSS, and Javascript) to implement Website Design uses a web browser.
- Back-end developer: Uses coding languages to develop more complex functionality behind the scenes of a web page.
In short, a web designer takes the goals set by the web developer and the initial designs created by the UX designer, combines the content from the graphic designer, creative content specialist, and UI designer, and creates a final mockup for the web page. The developer then takes the mockup design file, extracts the graphic elements, and uses it to code an online web page. As a result, if you are going to hire a web designer, you should have the strategy and most of the content for your website ready.
With all that said, take these job title descriptions with a grain of salt and don’t take them too seriously. These titles are generalizations and describe the traditional description of these roles. As we mentioned earlier, many people use the term “web designer” loosely, so it will mean something different to each person. Sometimes there is overlap between these roles; most web designers do their own marketing research or graphic and UX design, and some even do developer duties (especially front-end developers). Sometimes companies (or clients) combine these tasks and roles, depending on their budget. Always make sure that the client’s tasks match what you have in mind before starting a project.
What are the tasks of a web designer?
Let’s break down step by step everything a web designer does to create the final web pages.
What a web designer does:
- Visual design and overall layout: Using a basic design and sitemaps, website designers organize the content of a website to optimize visual communication, hierarchy, and aesthetic sensibilities.
- Responsive mobile design: Website designers also design the appearance of mobile and tablet versions of a web page.
- Files Static Mockup: Web designers create image files that represent the final appearance of a web page.
- Extractable Design Resources: Web designers layer their mockup files so that developers can isolate and extract each page element as needed, so they can implement them one by one on the final page.
- Image Editing: Web designers often need to be able to edit the visual media that is displayed on the page.
- Templates: Web designers often use some kind of markup language (especially HTML and CSS) to implement and test their designs on the browser page.
کارهایی که یک طراح وب انجام نمی دهد:
- Coding: A web designer’s work focuses on visual features and is usually not required to code the website.
- Writing: A web designer should not be expected to write the text for the site. If the website text is not yet ready, the designer will use a Lorem Ipsum text placeholder in their design.
- Branding: Web designers are not responsible for creating logos or deciding on visual branding elements such as determining color schemes and fonts used in off-page resources.
- Illustration: Web designers do not typically create the illustrations for the website. They use graphic resources created by other professionals in their designs. Some designers may design custom elements if needed.
- Photography: Web design and photography are two completely separate disciplines. If the client has not hired a photographer, the web designer will usually use stock photos from the internet in their design.
- Animation: Custom animations should be created by a professional animator or interaction designer.
- Marketing research: While web designers sometimes conduct research on their competitors before starting a design, they do not have access to all the data, analysis, and expertise that an in-house marketing specialist does. Web designers often rely on the client to provide this information.
What skills does a web designer need?
If you are considering becoming a web designer in the future, you should know the skills you need to succeed in this profession. While a college degree will definitely help you succeed, many web designers today learn these skills on their own, and there are plenty of online courses on web design.
Graphic Design Knowledge
That said, web designers are a type of designer, and even if they don’t create logos, they should know how to combine text, images, and colors in a visually pleasing way. They especially need to know how to strategically use design principles to make a positive impact on the viewer. Web designers should also be knowledgeable about the history of website design, knowing which design trends are still useful and which are overused and outdated.
Industry practices
Web design has been an established career path for the past two decades, with a number of design conventions and standard practices that have been established over time. Since websites are software that must be tangible to users, these conventions must be adhered to well in order to meet user expectations, and even make creative changes to them if necessary. These contracts are usually for the execution of a project and range from standard website layouts, network systems, mobile-centric designs, etc. Some of this can be learned through experience, and sometimes paying attention to industry conferences and talks, such as those posted on YouTube channels, will also provide useful information.
Software skills
While the initial designs of a website design can also be drawn with pen and paper, web designers ultimately need to use software that can be used by their team and the client. One of the most popular software used in web design is Photoshop, but UX prototyping programs like Sketch have also recently gained popularity among web designers.
Web Development Knowledge
While coding is usually the job of developers, building a website is a technical undertaking no matter how you look at it. Web designers need to be aware of technical capabilities and limitations, which is why it is often useful to have a little coding knowledge to see what designs work and what don’t. Implementing some design effects or textures with code can be difficult, and can sometimes result in large file sizes that slow down your site.