A Beautiful Marriage of Skill: The Benefits of a Web Developer who Designs
November 13, 2023
Before I became a web developer I was a designer who specialized in logo design. It was my favorite job to get and I loved seeing my work on the side of buildings, on social media, or on websites. Thing is, there’s a lot of good designers out there, and I found that many people were going to friends or acquaintances for these single, short-term jobs.
Website development had always interested me. Something about knowing coding languages was just cool to me. After toying around with a couple online instructional videos, I quickly began to experiment on my own and my love for web dev started to develop. I taught myself how to code out simple websites with the help of some online courses, and landed my first web developer job before even completing the course.
The Drawback of Designers Who Aren’t Web Developers:
As my career in web development progressed, I noticed one massive drawback that was rampant in the industry. Everyone was using graphic designers to design their websites. My job was to take those designs and translate them into websites. This caused quite a few problems.
My first major headache was that designers will make something that looks great, but without the knowledge that what they’re designing would take a massive amount of time to develop, if it was possible at all. I quickly began to vet my designers work before showing it to clients to avoid them liking something that wasn’t realistic.
Additionally, I’ve yet to come across a designer who really takes what a website can do and incorporates that into their work. It’s nothing against them, and I acknowledge that it can be difficult to exemplify functionality and animations in a picture, but it killed me knowing what we could be creating.
My Process:
When I’m designing my websites, I have my code editor open in another window. If I have an idea that I want to incorporate, I’ll play with it a bit and see if it will be worth the time or would negatively impact the site’s SEO, ADA compliancy, or user experience(UX). This approach has many benefits. Firstly, I can start developing more technical sections early and if I don’t end up using them, I can save them for a design where they fit better! It also enables me to show my clients my ideas, rather than just talking about them and potentially leading to a miscommunication.
Take my home page as an example. It’s kind of “pages within a page”. If I were to take this design as an image, it would be impossible to really see what it does. You wouldn’t be able to see that the background animation following your mouse, and when you click it adds more dots! You wouldn’t be able to click the buttons and see the transitions from the sections that make it feel like a video game menu. This type of design and website functionality flies in the face of conventionalism, and that’s the point. The whole purpose of a website is to make an impression. Yes, you do this with your content, testimonials, services, etc. but so does everyone else. Make your website truly unique and hire a web developer with a background in design (Personally, I’d appreciate it if it was me).