How I Became a Web Designer

Every­one has a story to tell and every­one has their own path of how they got to where they are today. I thought it would be nice to share my expe­ri­ence with you and offer some advice for any aspir­ing web design­ers out there as it is a ques­tion I get asked occasionally.

Let’s face it, any­one can call them­selves a web designer, pick up a Web Design for Dum­mies book and your done right? Per­son­ally I have been build­ing web­sites in one form or another since 2003, although I never really called myself a Web Designer. Back then things were very dif­fer­ent. There was no You Tube, No Face­book, and even no WordPress!

Every­thing I did was either hand coded or built using this hor­ri­ble tool called Dreamweaver (More like Night­mareWeaver). You did not worry about standards, accessibility, or how your web­site looked on an Iphone or Ipad  and Mobile inter­net was just a pipe dream.

If you wanted to put video on your web­site you needed 3 dif­fer­ent for­mats. 56K modems were com­mon place in the home and office and the most pop­u­lar web­site in col­lege was MiniClip.com where you could play lots of Flash Games for free. And Google looked some­thing like this:

After com­plet­ing my Mul­ti­me­dia Sys­tems degree with lit­tle clue about the world of busi­ness, my col­league and I went and setup Hyper­stream Lim­ited with the view to offer Web Design and Mul­ti­me­dia Ser­vices to local busi­nesses. Need­less to say we failed to gain any clients and our pric­ing was way out. Dis­s­a­pointed and with stu­dent debts upto our eye­balls we decided to go and get real jobs.

I man­aged to secure a some work as an IT con­sul­tant work­ing for var­i­ous com­pa­nies, includ­ing Tesco’s, Silent­night Fur­ni­ture, and Har­rigey Coun­cil, and then finally Cam­den Coun­cil. As I was installing the some super pow­ered com­put­ers for this guy called Adrian we got talk­ing about what they were for.

Adrian told me that he got some fund­ing to do a 3D Mul­ti­me­dia project called Build­ing Visions and that he was head­ing up the team. I men­tioned to him that I had some exper­ince with 3D and Mul­ti­me­dia and I showed him my port­fo­lio and an inter­view and a week later I was hired.

It was an inno­v­a­tive and excit­ing project to be involved with and it allowed me to really push the bound­aries of my Mul­ti­me­dia knowledge. Unfortunately all good things come to an end and 4 years later the team could not turn enough profit to keep a large team and Adrian the project man­ager was laid off, and even­tu­ally so was I.

When that hap­pened I decided to start push­ing my own busi­ness for­ward as I had learned so much and also left with my knowl­ege of Word­Press. See­ing Word­Press for the first time reignighted my pas­sion for Web Design and I have not looked back since.

Influ­en­tial Books that I have read

• What is Graphic Design
• The New Rules of Mar­ket­ing and PR
• Get­ting Things Done

Use­ful blogs to read

• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
• http://www.copyblogger.com/blog/
• http://lifehacker.com/

If there were 3 pieces of advice of could give to any­one enter­ing this game then it would be the following:

1. Clearly state your goals and write them down.
2. Keep learn­ing as much as you can.
3. Stay inspired.