The 3 Stages Of Maturing As A Web Designer

Plenty of seasoned web designers will look at the ‘newbies’ straight out of university with either a smirk of derision or with a small smile of reminiscence. As with many other professions, website creation will allow you to grow and mature as you get older and gain more experience. Here are the three stages you are likely to pass through in your career:

Design as Decoration

• Characteristics: these web designers are yet to reach their full potential; they’re program knowledge could do with some work, they don’t concern themselves with principles and theories and standards, and they tend to do what they want.
• Clients: often, these designers aren’t actively looking for clients; at the end of the day, what the client wants is more of a ‘suggestion’ then a guideline and they will still do what they want.
• Community: these web designers, whether you like to admit it or not, do contribute considerably to the community, mostly with their pure, unadulterated creativity.

Design as Discovery

• Characteristics: these web designers are starting to discover that, if something looks good to other people and they enjoy looking at it, they are more likely to engage with it.
• Clients: these designers have finally found that they are interested in what their clients have to say and they want to give them something that they are happy with.
• Community: these designers and their growing skill set are able to offer the community some pretty substantial contributions, especially now that they understand the process a bit more.

Design as Communication

• Characteristics: these web designers see design in everything around them and, in conjunction with their thorough understanding of principles and theories, will begin to question why certain decisions were made.
• Clients: these designers are generally split into two categories – the one who can create something amazing that the client can use and the one who is so popular that he can create anything and the client will like it.
• Community: these web designers are, essentially, the people who make the industry go round. They are the people that the other stages should look up to and learn from in order to improve on their own skills.

Whilst there is nothing wrong with being at any of the above stages, it is important to remember that being a web designer is a constant learning process – it takes time to mature and reach the ultimate stage from which all others are judged. So, which stage of maturity are you at – the infantile decoration, adolescent discovery, or the adult communication?