When visitors come at a website, they get appealed by the way it’s designed. An aesthetically beautiful website, conveying the real business message, is a success ingredient for the website owner. That’s why web designers are thought to lay the foundation for website building. They work on providing an enhanced look and feel to the site visitors or the business prospects.

With growing tough online competition, the importance of professional web designers increases many folds because they make a website shining against rivals.

Appreciating designers doesn’t mean one can ignore the web developers, the people who make a website working. Although both web developers and web designers work in close collaboration to complete a project, but the rift exists. They rule their own domains and don’t feel good to get interfered. Quit this philosophy if you want to succeed. Whether you are a web developer or a web designer, learn the other field. It will help you grow professionally and enjoy good working relationships. In this post, you will come to know the reasons, why web developers should learn web designing, how they can do that, and what should be learned.

Change The Concept Of Web Developers

As time is changing, web development is also facing modernity. Web developers solve the problems in way of smooth website working. They are not considered to work for website’s look and feel. This concept needs to be changed, and being a coder you are going to do that after reading this post.

Why Web Developers Should Learn Web Designing?

To learn web designing means to become more productive and efficient while building websites. Here are given some major reasons for web developers to learn web designing.

To become responsible

Learning web designing means becoming part of a team comprising human members, becoming responsible, and changing the typical concept of web developers.

To build websites without help

A web developer can sharpen the designing skills and can start working solely on a project. It will bring more projects and more earnings. No need to hunt for designers separately. However, this approach shouldn’t negate the significance of professional web designers.

Working on website interaction

A web developer having designing skills can work on interactivity of the website and coding at the same time.

Better teamwork

Most of the times, web developers and web designers are thought to be the rivals working on any project. Acquiring designing skills can help web developers in better understanding the designers and collaborate effectively. It also helps in better understanding each other’s perspective, leading towards extraordinary work.

Responsive website building

As evolving technology is giving birth to a large variety of devices, web developers have to build responsive websites. Learning the basics of designing helps them in creating smartphone friendly websites. Having a designer’s eye, web developers can realize how certain design elements will behave. How esthetically beautiful desktop sites can be made mobile friendly, web developers should know. Both web designers and developers can come up at elegant and prudent web solutions after brainstorming ideas.

After understanding how different design elements work, it’s easy for developers to write concise and consistent code, and modular CSS. Both these aspects are integral to create responsive websites, working smoothly on any device.

Know the design to know the users

Working for users need a clear understanding of what do they want. Web developers need to pay attention to this aspect of website building. Usually, they focus the technical details of a website, but it lets them ignore the end users, failing to reach user-friendly solution. A better understanding of web designing helps coders in coping with that problem. An earlier engagement in the web designing process enables web developers to know the roots, the designing issues, and ways to stay closer to the end users. All these things lead towards a better web solution for a business and the target audiences.

Developers can enjoy coding

For developers, what else could be the best reason to learn designing other than enjoying coding? Solid discussions among designers and developers prove productive and collaborative. Going beyond the technicalities of the project helps developers feel great and accomplished. Read books, online tutorials, attend design conferences online, meet with designers’ communities, hold discussions; that could be your learning mode. After that, start asking questions at your workstation. The more you gain knowledge the better you will feel while coding.

To enhance the designing skills

Isn’t it amazing to add few more skills to your resume, like learning about graphic designing tools? This will surely force you, as a developer, to go for enhancing your existing skill set. It will increase the chances of getting a dream job.

To enhance the esthetic sense

Web designers are known to have sharp esthetic sense. By learning the designing process, a coder can also determine the esthetic criterion of a website. Refining the visual skills is a step towards becoming aesthetically sensible, a designers’ trait.

To know the business requirements

It’s not just the business environment getting competitive; web developers also have to face tough competition. By acquiring designing skills, a coder can understand the client’s requirements and can deliver the best web solution with unrivaled look and feel. Website interactivity is another strong aspect that developers could focus if they have the designing guts.

No need to get helped out

If a developer knows how to design, he/she can work on any website without getting helped out by any other designer. Earning more without sharing is the outcome of working on any project solely.

How To Acquire The Designing Skills?

After knowing the reasons behind acquiring the designing skills, it’s time to know where to go for that purpose. Here are given some ideas and places to take help from.

Get inspired!

Browse the web and explore best web designs. Get inspiration from excellent designing work. It will ultimately improve your taste of website designing. Dribble and Best Web Gallery are the places to look for some inspirational design work.

Go through online tutorials

Thanks to the web. There are amazing websites helping fresh designing enthusiasts to acquire basic and advanced web designing skills. Few are mentioned below!

Tutsplus: The website has 18804 tutorials and 454 videos to help newbie designers learning the art. The learning categories include HTML, CSS, Photoshop, design theory, and the list goes on.

Lynda: It’s another amazing video tutorial site for fresh and experienced web designers. For coders, this website offers great help to sharpen their designing skills. It also offers web designing courses, supplemented by free video tutorials. Learn the latest web designing tips as part of a large variety of available courses in the library.

Treehouse: Learn about designing, coding, and business through more than 1000 videos. The library is equipped with tutorials about latest developments in the technology world. Earn badges for the courses you learn. These badges show the skills you acquired and are viewable by anyone online.

Start Implementing What You Learn And Get Feedback

It’s not just about acquiring the designing skills, but about implementing them. Get feedback from expert designers and end users about your work. Keep the web design simple, yet elegant with rich features. To get feedback from other experts, join online communities like.

Forrst from Zurb: It’s an online community of web designers and developers, where they share their work and get detailed feedback from experts. It helps in becoming sharp in whatever skill you have acquired.

Silverback: It offers usability testing for newbie and experienced developers and designers. For your newly gained skills, this could be a better platform to know what you have accomplished and how much improvement is needed for perfection.

Designing Concepts That Coders Need To Know

Now, come to the designing concepts and practices that a web developer should know.

• Design is more about web personality: Developers shouldn’t consider designing as a visual part of a website, but a complete personality of a business. The very first moment a visitor enters a website and the point he/she leaves, web design supports the experience. It reveals the business objective. The site load speed, hovering and clicking, delivering new content, all these are part of the web design. As design affects the overall user experience, so every person working on the project should be a designer. If a coder knows how the end user interacts with the website, he/she is a designer.
• Design should be user centric: Whether it’s a site or app, users should be given due consideration from the very start. A web design should be user centric. Main purpose is to help users browse the website with speed and effectiveness.
• It’s all about details: To create a good design, a coder should pay attention to the details. What does it mean by attention to details? It means how a design can help satisfying the users or annoying them. Being a coder, you need to learn when the minute details need attention and when the bigger picture should be kept in mind.
• Use sketches for learning: Before designing, better to sketch. It will help building a relationship between content and hierarchy. You don’t have to spend on creating sketches and it involves less time as well. You can share your ideas about website layout and user experience by drawing sketches. No mockups or coding is required to display ideas. It’s not tough to use boxes, arrows, and squiggled lines to show ideas. However, you need to express the underlying ideas of sketches in front of experts or clients.
• Know how to use white space: What’s the importance of using white space? To let the site visitors breathe. It’s needed to process information. It’s just like breaking a paragraph into sentences. The best example of using white space perfectly is that of Apple. The company has utilized white space to highlight its products.
• Use grids for design unity: Grids create relationship between different design objects, allow visual alignment, create vertical and horizontal rhythm and an optical balance. It’s not a CSS framework, but an important design tool that needs to be used with clear sense.
• Emphasize the important item on a page: In design, focus a single element per page. Offer a clear hierarchy while pointing the visitors towards the direction they want.
• Save inspirations: As you are going to design along with coding, save the things that inspire you like pictures, videos, websites, posters, etc. These will help you getting ideas when needed while dealing with a specific designing issue. Save the inspirational work in a folder.
• Problem solving for the users: Web designing is more like solving problems for the users. Make use of features that help users during their stay at the site. While making use of colors, images, and anything else, question yourself, why you are going for some particular choice. It will help you in coming up with a solution, not just a design.
• Concluding the discussion: Learning web designing is though not necessary for coders, but it enhances their vision of website building and helps them in earning more because they can work solely on any project. Don’t consider designing as a talent that designers have, but a skill set that you, as a coder, can acquire. Dip into the designing world and practice what you have learnt. The more you practice, the more you will shine with your work. See your career blossoming with multiple skills like designing and developing.

What’s your opinion about learning web designing while being a coder? Share in the comments below!