Are you a web designer? If so, you have a huge workload on your shoulder! Not only a designer needs to combine the content and visuals harmoniously, but they also need to contain some non-technical skills like communication and collaboration. Being a designer is never easy but if you manage to master a few skills, you can be an inspiring web designer and can craft outstandingly alluring website design.

Without much ado, we’ll quickly jump into the essential skills for a web designer, standing in 2019.

Know the Design Principles

Well, design is nothing but artwork and like the other artworks, you don’t need to learn the design principles to design. However, it’s also an undeniable fact that if you start learning the principles of design, you would be way more productive than you used to be. Basically, these principles are the basic fundamentals that can make the difference between creating a design that you see and the creation of a design which is driven to uniqueness, calculation, and knowledge.

You should always know the principles of design as they are rooted in the fundamentals and basics of the graphic and web design including different visual design principles like Emergence, Reification, and Invariance.

Should Possess Typography Skills

Well, being a designer, you should already know how important it is to use the best typography in front of your users. Typography is powerful enough to convey a story and communicate with users. Moreover, typography shapes our perception of ideas, whereas the geometry and weight of the types will transmit the meaning. Thus, you should always know the appropriate typographical choices to deliver the message in the best way possible.

A newbie designer may feel lost in the middle of so many fonts! Well, while Roboto, Georgia, and Verdana are the practical fonts that work for the body copy, decorative typefaces should be the focal point of the

ornamentation. With time, you should learn the major and minute difference among different typefaces and the best cases to use.

Good Composition Skills

For any sorts of design, the composition is something you cannot ignore if you want your design to stand tall among the rest. The arrangement and amalgamation of visuals, text, images, and other components make the whole design artistic and utilitarian. The perfect composition brings the visual harmony of the design you create along with the hierarchy of the ideas. Basically, any credible composition should always highlight the important content and make them look great to get our attention.

A good composition denotes having the right balance with negative space, proportioned components, and contrast. Always be attentive to your surroundings. The more you are going to observe the surroundings like movies, paintings, banners, and websites, the better you’ll be able to understand the whole concept and introduce freshness in your own designs.

Should be Proficient in Color Theory

When it comes to the skills a web designer should have, there’s no way we can miss out the color theory. The basic concepts like combining primary colors to create new colors will help you in a big way for crafting the outstanding and great color palettes. Being a designer, it’s your responsibility to know about the color wheel and how analogous, contrasting, and complementary colors work together.

One mistake, done by many designers most of the time is that they tend to use the clashing colors! Well, visual dissonance can be an element that can build an interesting design but there’s also a good chance that your layout will become unreadable and ugly as a result. When you are designing the headers, CTAs (call to action), and text, make sure you are using colors that work together and offer strong legibility to the users. Understanding when to use which shades, brightness, contrast, and combination is something that makes a designer valued.

Efficiency with Software

When you are a web designer, you have to have familiarity with the designing software. At the moment, the two biggest designing software in the market are Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. And you have to master the use of these two software if you want to survive in the world of web designing. Unless you know how to use these two amazing software, you’ll never be able to grasp the photo-editing basics. Regardless of how good you sketch or conceptualize, knowing the use of the designing software would help you utilize your conceptions and create a design out of it.

Well, if you are just starting out and don’t want to use Photoshop or Illustrator, considering the budget, you can always go for the free alternatives like Photopea, Gimp or Inkscape. These tools can turn out to be the best solution to you, being the perfect replacement for the paid tools in the market.

Knowledge of Responsive Design

If you don’t give a damn about responsive design while designing a web page layout, you’re cheating yourself since the web now revolves around the responsive design. The responsive design is the key to every web development project in today’s date. Responsive website denotes the fact that your website elements are usable everywhere irrespective of the screen sizes and device types.

The responsive web design ensures the fact that your content is delivered to the users and it works by providing a master layout that adjusts according to different screen sizes where it is loaded on. When a website has a responsive design, it ensures that the site will reach more people without forfeiting the user experience. So, if you are a designer, make sure you design it with the responsiveness in mind.

Take Care of User Experience (UX)

Every efficient designer always takes care of the user experience more than anything else. This is because the user experience is something that will define the users’ emotional reaction to a design. The user experience depends on the website’s usability and the integration of the dynamic and interactive components into the design to make it a delight to navigate. UX is always a preferred aspect for any designer to care because of its ability to engaging and guiding a user throughout the site.

In order to have the best user experience in your design, below are some UX practices you may take a look at:

• Logically constructed content, clutter-free layout and smart use of negative space.
• Design with empathy – a design that is driven to humans over machines
• Design should always be audience-centric, which means your design should serve the specific needs of the audience of your business.

Conclusion

These are the seven must-have skills for every successful web designer. You need to understand one simple fact – gone are those days when designing was limited only to the colors, images, and shapes. Nowadays, you need to understand the audience’s psychology, taste, and preference in order to come up with a design that actually adds value. If you are lacking any of the above seven skills we have mentioned, you should start learning and working out. Unless you are eligible enough, you cannot expect anyone to consider you the best designer!

Now, if you think we missed out something, you are free to let us know. We will evaluate your feedback and improve our article if that really adds value to our article.