Part artistry and part science, web design taps into both the creative and analytical side of a person’s mind.
Web designers take what’s conceptual and translate it into visuals. Images, typography, colors, text, negative space, and structure come together offering not only a user experience but a conduit for communicating ideas.
A good web designer understands the significance of each piece of a design. They make choices on a granular level, styling each element, while never losing sight of how the elements will come together and function in delivering on the design’s greater goals.
No matter how spectacular the visuals of a web design, it’s meaningless without organization. Logic needs to guide the arrangement of ideas and visuals on each page, as well as direct how users will travel through it. A skilled web designer creates designs that deliver in the least number of clicks.
Web design can be broken down into several subdisciplines. Some designers make their careers specializing in areas like UI, UX, SEO, and other areas of expertise. As you begin your journey as a designer, you should know a little bit about all these different facets of web design.
You’re going to come across the terms back end and front end as you are learning. Most beginners mix these up, so it’s important to know how they’re different.
The back end is everything that runs behind the scenes in displaying a website. Websites reside on servers. When a user makes a request like navigating to a specific section of a website, the server takes this incoming information and in turn shoots out all of the HTML and other code so that it displays in the user’s browser correctly. Servers host the data a website requires to function.
Web developers who specialize in back-end development are often programmers who work in such languages as PHP, might use a Python framework like Django, write Java code, manage SQL databases, or use other languages or frameworks in making sure that servers, applications, and databases are all working together.
In becoming a web designer, you don’t need to go too deep in learning about what happens on the back end, but you should at least understand its purpose.
The back end is considered the server side while the front end is the client side. The front end is where HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other code work together to display a website. This is the part of a web design that people engage with.
As you advance in your career you might venture into more specialized areas of web development. You may end up working with frameworks like React or Bootstrap or go deeper with JavaScript or jQuery. These are more advanced areas that you shouldn’t worry too much about in the beginning.
