Readers Poll! What Kind of Training Do You Have for Web Design?
This week’s poll is all about web design education – Did you go to school to learn or are you a self-taught designer? Or maybe you’re like me and you went to school only to realize that learning on your own was a lot more effective! Post your own answer at the poll, and then join the discussion!
Is A Formal Education Important?
One of the interesting (and wonderful) things about working in the field of web design is that you don’t really need to have a formal training background to succeed… in fact, some of the most successful designers in the world never set foot in a design class or a coding course.
A number of great designers actually think that school can be more of a hindrance to aspiring designers than anything else. To them, the idea of a structured educational curriculum for a field that changes on a weekly basis is certainly a challenge, but everybody learns differently, so how did you learn?
The Poll
Let the Discussion Begin
Do you think web design can even be taught in a class? Have you had any great experiences with formal training courses? Are you a book learner or a “learn by doing” kind of a designer? There are certainly more than just 4 different categories of education, so share a little bit about your own background down below and read about what other people have to say.
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I’ll share a little about my own educational background: I took a couple courses at a local college, then discovered that it was moving waaay too slowly to keep my interest (who wants to wait another 7 days to find out the difference between a TD and a TR?!). This was before any useful online resources were even out (in the early 2000′s), so I ended up picking up books on web design and then started learning on my own. Working on my own projects (instead of school-related projects) was a lot more interesting and engaging for me and it gave me the motivation that I needed to push myself to learn everything that I could.
Eventually, 4 years after quitting school, I returned to college to finish my degree. The whole experience of going back to college after I had already been working in the field professionally was strange to say the least. I finished up a degree in “Graphic Design”, but as any of you who go to college for design might know, you’re required to complete a couple web design courses. I found these courses to be useful for getting students started… but by no means would I ever recommend someone to rely completely on a college to train them for web design. To me, it’s just one of those things that you need to learn by doing it over and over and over :)
Did you find that going back to study after you had been self-taught for four years that the course was a breeze? Were you able to gloss over a lot of what you already know?
I just can’t see how a structured curriculum can keep up with the way the web develops. You can learn something today and I will be obsolete tomorrow.
I agree! The only caveat that I would place on your statement is that there are some things that, as a rule of thumb, don’t change: basic HTML and CSS are the same now as it was when I learned it. The “theory” behind cascading stylesheets, linking scripts to a document, and understanding other “principle level” ideas are mostly unchanging from year to year. The only problem that colleges have is that most of these principles can be learned just as easily outside of a classroom than they can be taught inside a classroom ;)
Thanks for the comment L1!
I disagree. I think it is possible to create a well rounded and up to date curriculum for a college class that is 4 months long. You’d probably have to go to a more specialized school though, I would assume, as traditional colleges might not keep up with the latest standards. And also, quite frankly, for a basic class, stuff does not become obsolete so fast.
Well… i’m completely 100% self-taught. Interestingly, I started at Wikipedia. Not reading the articles, but actually editing the pages and dropping the odd span tag in there. I then extended that into customizing my Wikipedia signature with some inline styling and everything built up from there. The rest is all a blur.
All the “formal education”, i’ve had is classes at school that consisted of these awful, table-based monstrosities. (I was the only one in the class, nay the school who did not use tables and produce a good result!)
I’m currently learning PHP and MySQL from W3Schools and a website called Tizag (http://www.tizag.com/). It’s not web design, but i’m hopefully moving onto C++ and iOS/Android development by 2012.
Right now though, i’m happy to be receiving education on design standards through WebDesignTuts+. I’ve already learned loads!
Very interesting Connor – that makes me think: will there be an entirely new generation of designers that “learned” from things like Wikipedia, MySpace, forums, and other platforms that allow users to post their own content? I know that I learned a ton by trying to hack/break/fix the MySpace profile editor way back in the day (even though I cringe when I say it!). At that time I didn’t even consider myself a “web designer”, I was just a kid who hated the default settings… I’ll bet there are a lot of other people that learn the basics this way as well.
Thanks for the comment Connor!
Heaven help the designers that “learned” from myspace ;)
I was waiting for that ;) It’s kinda like car mechanics learning the basics by rebuilding a Pinto… hehe.
Needless to say, it was often an exercise in how not to code.
I, too, will admit to having had one of my first forays into design through breaking the Myspace editor.
The other big one was GEOCITIES!
There was one point where everyone had some pretty atrocious looking geocities pages, but it was great for learning about how not to code and playing around with web design.
Shameful to say but freewebs….. they had an HTML integration tag. So I slowly start to learn it.
Finally then started to make my own PSDs and themes with all thanks to Nettuts+ :D
I self-taught myself,five months ago, while making a website for my school project and learnt how to use Photoshop, Illustrator, HTML, CSS and some basic jQuery.
I started coding websites before there were any formal education available for “web design”, so I can’t really comment on how effective school courses are. Web design and development has evolved so much over the years (been doing this since 2000, and been an Internet junkie since the mid-90′s) that learning by doing is really the way to go, that is, if you want a true understanding of the medium.
Thanks for the comment Anne – it’s funny to think that for a field that effects so much of our lives today, 10 years ago there weren’t even classes for this kind of stuff.
Too true Brandon! If I were to recommend a college course for a new web designer it would be to take a course in communication design, and if possible, advertising.
Now I realize that with a communication design degree, you’ll have to sit through classes in web design, which may or may not, be quality, depending on the instructor/s and their level of expertise and knowledge. This is where you might want to be a self-learner and combine it with the best of what the rest of the communication design course and/or advertising can teach you. I would also do thorough research on the best schools before spending money on a course that you may, or may not, need.
I totally agree – while I found my web-design specific courses to be a little too rigid for my own learning habits, the courses that I took in marketing, advertising, business, and communication turned out to be invaluable. I use the stuff I learned from those other classes each and every day, even if they don’t directly relate to web design. Then again, I’m sure there are some great books for that kind of stuff too… what the classroom provided in those classes was a place to discuss the somewhat abstract principles, where my web design classes didn’t really do a lot of discussing at all. Perhaps the value of the classroom goes beyond the core material and has more to do with the community learning atmosphere… Anyways, great comment :)
Personally I got interested in web development really young and started off before I knew proper English (to read tutorials). My method was quite hilarious now that I think back – I used to visit websites and use “save as” to play around with the code and eventually figure out what all the elements did and how to connect them with other stolen images and annoying DHTML effects…
Nowadays I’m in college and I just finished my first course of web development which contained basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The progress through the different elements and properties was incredibly slow (as it was for you) and to be honest, focused on the wrong parts. Basically you can figure out the html elements if you see the rendered version next to the code version – the real trouble for most of my friends were the CSS definitions. When I explained the difference between inline, block, float, resets and the box model everything unraveled itself. This was not taught properly throughout the entire class, and I can understand trying to figure out the boxmodel yourself when you want to create something beautiful is NOT fun.
Besides the fundamentals everything was quite outdated – we were taught HTML5 but for some reason not CSS3. Which I find really quite strange as CSS3 makes web designing fun when you’re playing around and learning.
I might add I’m not studying webdesign but information technology so maybe I’m to harsh on the course.
Oh and the worst part (nowadays I’m focusing on node/js development) our teacher mentioned javascript being derived from java. Who would guess teaching out _wrong_ information actually caught on… “Even though I know Java, JavaScript seemed like it was an entirely new language” was one of many comparable comments in the project reports.
After my own experience and the experience of my class mates learning both from me and from the teacher I would definitely say they would learn faster and more accurate information by themselves.
Regarding the design part I don’t think you can really learn it in a classroom either. Sure the fundamentals regarding color theory and flow concepts you can learn. But doing and redoing over and over again is the same thing whether you do it in class or at home. Personally I learned from playing around with photoshop, reading tutorials and just visiting hundreds of thousands of websites.
UI/UX is definitely something more though, I don’t know how many people study it, we don’t even have it in our school but the more I read about it the more I realize it is a science you can actually study…
While it might seem funny, I think your method of reverse engineering sites was probably (and may still be) the best way people had to learn back in the day. Just like engineers, lots of us got started just by breaking things apart and rebuilding them :) Thanks for sharing Oxy!
I learned the basics by downloading sites and reading the code. HTML isn’t difficult to learn – it only required a good memory for the elements, and that was easy compared to acing high school history exams. By the team I took a design class in school (it was a short summer class, I didn’t take a full design course), I was already ahead of the rest of the class and it was infuriating to learn stuff at such a slow pace.
Of course, since I don’t work in design or development after finishing school, most of my classmates are much better than me now, and that’s ok, because I now have more people to learn from. :)
Nowadays, I pick up eBooks and read on W3schools to polish up on my skills. I’m extremely rusty and probably better suited managing servers than writing code or making design mock-ups. :)
Started off down the self taught avenue, worked a few jobs in the industry. Then came to the conclusion I wanted more, so I completed a B.A.S. in Multimedia Design, A.A.S. in Graphic Design and multiple certs, definitely believe a college degree(s) helps in the corporate world.
Nice Chris! Followup question for ya: What do you feel you got out of the formal education that you wouldn’t have learned otherwise?
I know that the areas where school helped me the most was my marketing/business courses (nothing to do directly with design, but its something I use every day); it’d be interesting to hear from another designer who went down the college path.
Being inspired by my professors and fellow students was one of the biggest things I got out of school along with the experience of interaction and building relationships on a professional level.
I started with Web Design for Dummies, which got me into using WYSIWYG editors. That set me back about four months, as I was avoiding hard-coding anything. When I finally decided to learn HTML and CSS, I learned everything from free online resources. I am still not the best out there, and I still have to do a quick search now and then for an issue (who doesn’t?), but for the most part I am a proficient web designer.
I really want to take some classes on it, see if I’m missing anything major, and I definitely need to learn about search-engine-optimization. As far as the layout and interface goes, Google is my best resource.
I have gone from playing with the WYSIWYG editors to hard-coding (X)HTML websites, WordPress templates and Modx templates. I probably need the formal education for JavaScript — that just hasn’t clicked with me yet (no pun intended).
Thanks for posting Ross – it’s interesting that you mention needing formal training for Javascript – I’d encourage you to try the same self-taught approach to it though, as most JS stuff can be learned online as well :) It’s starting out that’s the hardest part.
I had read some good 3 books on programing before, and it never clicked. Then, I came across javascript & ajax for dummies, by Andy Harris, and it finally clicked. I picked up this book because I wanted to customize a blogspot blog that I have. With what I learned I was finely able to do what I wanted. Also, go to your local library, that’s where I got the book. I don’t know why it took so long to click in my head, but once it did, it actually looked pretty easy.
Thank you both of you. I guess I will go ahead and try to learn JavaScript on my own again. Starting out truly is the hardest part. I love the jQuery library and want to be able to utilize it more, but I guess I’d better get back to the basics with beginners’ JavaScript.
Try : JQUERY: NOVICE TO NINJA
This book really helped me a lot…
Thank you! I will look into it!
I have been dipping my toes in web design since about 2005, and all the things that go in hand with it (ie. photoshop, illustrator..etc). I was all self taught, since I was teaching myself while I was in high school. After high school I thought I would take a look at colleges that offered a “web design” major.
It turns out most schools don’t have a “web design” major, but some schools have started to open up “interactive media” majors.
I decided to attend my first year of education at the Art Institute in Chicago as it looked promising. I was wrong. Everything was very out of date once you got to the actual web design classes. When I feel I know more than my teacher, I start to think the class is a waste of money.
After a year there I decided to move back to my roots in St. Louis (currently residing), and found another school that had a new Interactive Media Major (no one has even graduated from it yet). It is a pretty small school, but Maryville University has been very good with this major. The main difference I saw from AI in Chicago, and Maryville is the people running the department. My professors are up to date and usually have a job in the field and teach on the side. They actually understand that you can’t design something that looks like it belongs in 2004, and publish it in 2010.
In the end, I feel like you can go both ways. I have learned most of what I know from teaching myself, but when it comes to the actual design theory, my introductory design classes helped a lot when looking back. I also find that learning things such as ActionScript, and Javascript are a lot easier to learn when you have a professor that works his/her hardest to make sure you understand it, which is something those at the Art Institute in Chicago failed at.
I was enrolled in Graphic design at University, but drop before graduation to learn on my own, much more effective,
I start working doing logos and websites with friends in local clients like restaurants, etc
In my time at school , they did not had webdesign classes, 2000′s , i am a great designer, but have some questions how to put everything together, finish up and publishing…
I always designed and pay someone to finish the web, but if someone can give me any suggestions,
iam very good in Illustrator n photoshop, in design but would like to know if there is a specific program easir than Dreamweaver, a easier way to do it, should I learn Fireworks?
what about site grinder? is it good software?
Tks for your help
Hey Rick,
I do logos and website designs in Photoshop as well. Even though I have Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks, as well as iWeb and other editors I have tried in the past, the most effective means of creating websites that I have found is just coding by hand. I just use a normal code highlighter, not Dreamweaver, and it keeps everything so much simpler. Once you learn CSS, you can build pretty much any website you can design in Photoshop. I followed the W3schools tutorials to learn CSS, and they were excellent.
Dreamweaver is a good program, but I find it over-complicated. I can manage my website files easily enough without Dreamweaver, and like I said, I write all my code from scratch. Flash is not a program I would recommend for building any full website, and I would never recommend Fireworks for building websites.
You will never achieve the same level of perfection in a website from a program that produces the code for you (at least not in 2010) – the way to go is writing your own code (or having someone do that for you). Once you learn, the level of control you have is amazing, the simplicity astounds you, and you can easily build templates for yourself to quickly create future websites.
I hope this helps!
I highly recommand yu to learn Fireworks for web- / screendesign. Here are 50 reasons why. http://www.reinegger.net/50_reasons_not_to_use_photoshp_for_webdesign.html
What web design education gives you is time and space for experiments and is actually pushing our creativity. I will be leaving soon my web/graphic design course and feel that I’ve learned things that I would not have learned in other places or as self taught.
It is more about the people you encounter there: colleagues, teachers. At school we are to solve design problems following traditional methods. A lot of research, typography, group sessions, brainstorming, web standards etc. These are some of the things that you may not benefit when you start learning by yourself using most of your resources available online.
Another issue that I’ve heard about is that there are so many students enrolling on Interactive Media/Arts courses and think that these are courses where you learn web design. It is not like that. They do teach a lot of Photoshop and Flash, but very little about usability, accessibility and web standards, let alone good design practice.
I majored in computer and network technology at a vocational school. but I didn’t understand at all about anything in this field (until now). then somehow I got interested in the world of web design. after several months of self-taught learning , I ventured to apply as a web designer at an agency. and that’s where I started to dig into web design.
Well, I have completed my 3 yrs degree in fashion technology. where I absorbed more about arts, colors, minimalism, design forms & elements. In fashion, I was more towards conceptual design rather than wearable one. I always had passion for the word called “WEB”. So first, I developed a website for my own brand in fashion. It took me 3 months to make that site as I didn’t have any coding knowledge & it starts from there. Now over a year I am working as successful Web designer as well as Fashion Designer.
I have a real hodgepodge of educational levels. I actually started writing HTML when I was a teen, so about 11 years ago. When I got out of high school Flash pages were the cool thing so I took my very first ever web class at the local community college on Flash. In a term of that class I created a web site entirely in flash for the term project. That was all fine and dandy for a while.
All of my friends went into business school with dreams of fast cars, fast women and lots of money and I followed that movement and gave up on web design and dove into business marketing. I still occasionally dabbled in Flash sites if I was bored at night. After two years of college my now wife got pregnant, so it was time for a career change and fast. Still enjoying Flash development but understanding my design skills sucked I went to art school. There I learned the wonderful world of CSS and actually learned a few principals of design.
Left art school after 2 years and took my first web gig. From there I just self taught everything up until now.
So moral of my story, some school I think is essential to understand the fundamental principals of any career path. However, in the web industry in particular I agree with alot of the commenters that the technology changes so rapidly that schooling becomes obsolete after the fundamentals. You really need to be self motivated and able to learn on your own just to keep up. Not to mention it’s easier on the pocket book :)
Finally going to add to a discussion for once.
I, for one, am going to ITT Tech for a degree in Visual Communications. I just completed the only web design class offered for this Associates Degree. Very irritated about this. But the class? I spent most of the time teaching other students.
For this reason, I will classify myself as 100% self taught, and here’s why: A few weeks before that class started, I was hooked up with an internship from the school. The main designer for the company, although unable to make it, left a list of questions for me to be interviewed. 3 of the five of them pertained to web design, including tags and more. My answer to those questions was: “I don’t know, but I will know.”
After that interview, immediately after, mind you, I purchased Head First Lab’s: Head First HTML with XHTML & CSS. Within 2 weeks, I had that book over 75% completed, puzzles and exercises and all. Starting that job and firing up Dreamweaver for the first time to do an email blast for them was a very quick learning experience, and it’s odd if I spend a week not doing at least two email blasts.
I’m annoyed that I’m paying for a degree though, and they’re pretty much ignoring the most profitable area of graphic design (in my eyes) to only give us a basic HTML course and that was it. In fact, I’ve gotten my first Web Site to do that isn’t a WordPress, and while it is a template, I still got to get inside of it and re-structure parts of it for my client. The thing that is annoying about the classes though, is that this is the very first time that I’m playing with forms for a contact us page, and am deathly afraid of how they’re going to react when the site is uploaded. There was a PHP file with the template, but I have no clue how to make it work, or how it will work. And this is the frustration of these classes, is that they pick and choose what to follow, what they can show you, and people like me who can pick things up in an instant are left to wait for those who are day-dreaming of becoming game designers (a near impossibility for people of their LACK of talent in Michigan…). I almost think that I’d be better off learning it on my own, but I also don’t want to be a pure freelancer, which means that a degree must come in to play with all of these HR reps writing up BS requirements for a graphic designer to get hired by a company.
I hope you work out the contact form! I have been learning PHP on and off, to the point of making my own contact forms, and while it now seems relatively simple, it took a while to click. You said you don’t know how they will react when you upload them; something I do is make a testing server and constantly upload and test my websites, to make sure they work perfectly. It is much easier to catch a bug earlier on.
I am self-taught when it comes to web design but still have a lot to learn as everyone always does. You can never know everything.
I’m pretty happy with the route I chose however. I began learning web coding when I was 16, just HTML then and picked up CSS a year or so after it was being used regularly. I’m also self-taught on Photoshop and various other programs but Illustrator and InDesign we learned a bit in school but the way they did it is they showed us the basics and threw projects our way and gave us deadlines to try and get things done so it was half learning on our own and half learning from the teacher which I think works because you learn things much faster and I feel you remember them when you have to put it all into practice figuring it out on your own.
I’m enrolled in a graphic design program at a university right now. I think it all depends on which school you go to that determines how effective it’ll be. Mine included one class on web design. It showed the basics and i’m light years ahead of everyone else practically teaching the class, however, the other courses aren’t that way. I was amazed at how much I learned in such a short period of time. I’ve been taking design courses for a year and a half and i’ve learned corporate identity, package designs, various forms of print design, advertising, copywriting, bits of marketing, web design, intro’s to flash, some illustration, public speaking and next semester we’ll be getting more in depth with corporate identity, flash, publication design and illustration.
It’s a pretty great program. It teaches a lot of the theory into making great work. The focus is on creating the best concepts and being able to back it up with reason and not just saying “ya that looks good.”
In contrary to most of you I were rather late to internet because 1 I’m rather young (just below 19) and 2 I’m not from the richest of families so we didn’t have internet until the 2006-2007 shift.
However 2008 I started at the Swedish equivalent of and there we had a web-design course but my knowledge of html and css were zero before that. That course were a trigger for me but I felt that it went way to slow forward so I taught myself with help of the internet, mainly by looking at the source-code of other sites and reading tutorials but I got bored of that rather fast and started diving in to php combined with html, css and javascript (obviously ajax included).
After that course I had an internship at an web-firm second half 2009 where I built them a CMS which taught me a lot of more advanced php but I didn’t really develop my html and css knowledge there.
So even if school triggered my interest late 2008 I would say that I’m pretty much self taught and I wouldn’t be remotely close to where I am today if I wouldn’t taught myself.
I learned HTML when I was in college, and I know what my instructor trying to do, he introduced to us the basics of making a website by simple HTML tag. And I’m happy to know that webpages consists of markup tags that browsers used to read and then interpret for the viewers to see.
I am not satisfied of what I gain, so I decided to learn on my own. I’ve download e-books about HTML and CSS and read it. I also read the online tuts of web design… until I found a very liable source of tuts. HTML Dog the owner of this site is a web designer also.. just like you brandon. W3schools, Nettuts+ and webdesign.tutsplus.com
I learned a lot from those sites. I owe you all guys the authors of every published post for sharing your knowledge and also for the commentors for additional knowledge too…
i started learning by doing then get the “how to do it the right way” by sites of the tuts network, smashingmagazine or css-tricks!
I am mostly self-taught, did go to a web development school for a while though.
In my opinion school is a great way to spark interest and learning the basics, but in the end anyone who want’s more needs to know how learn new things on their own.
A personal interest and a good attitude is pretty much the only way to attain a great set of skills for design.
I’m 100% self-taught from books and online resources. School and university sucks in italy. That’s all. I’d love to have the opportunity to study in American or British colleges :(
I think there’s a missing poll option:
‘I completed a formal degree, but am mostly self-taught’
I did complete a University Degree with Honours in Multimedia Design however I would probably say I was still 80-90% self-taught in terms of any development knowledge I have. As University’s and College’s don’t tend to be very up to date.
I’m 100% self taught. I’ll tend to read up on the basics (or view a tutorial video or three) to get a feel for the new software / technology / technique and then crash headlong into a test project. For me, there’s no other way to actually learn than by getting my hands dirty and using the technology.
Formal classes don’t do it for me – they move too slowly, cover topics that aren’t relevant and cost too much money, when I could have instead spent the time putting together a passable finished product that consolidated my learning in a much more solid manner than listening to someone else talk about it or reading about it, and I’ll also get something to put in my portfolio to impress potential clients.
On a related note, when I’m looking to hire or subcontract, I don’t even read the education part of the CV – it’s irrelevant. Three things matter to me: ability, experience and attitude. Everything else is just fluff.
I first encountered web design in college, and at the time didnt really take to it. Like some others have stated the need to change you Myspace (cringe) made me learn (badly) a few different HTML elements etc and then in my final year of college we had another web design class and I started to get into it more and more, although I was using Flash to create highly (cheeesy) animated content as was fashionable at the time.
When it came to choose what course to do at university web design was one of the top choices and that what I ended up going with. I did 3 years and can honestly say as it came to the final year I was really wishing I had done another course. My uni was crap and I didnt feel like the course was very helpful and that anything they had “taught” me wasnt something I couldnt have just learned on my own.
I graduated a few years ago (£21,000 in debt! thanks to student loans!) and ended up getting a job in a small design studio. I can honestly say that I’ve learned more in the last 3 years here than I ever did in university. Being thrown in at the deep end with real clients is the motivation you really need to get better and meet the demand for the highest quality.
i really enjoy my job now, and have learned alot from the poeple here (only a very small team) about the business side of things which will be very handy for the future, as well learning alot of design for print and actual printing, which just adds to the experience that many employers require in the cuurent climate.
However, if it was not for my Degree in web design I never would have got the job, so although I did feel for a while it was a waste of time, it has got me to where I am today.
I am also 100% self taught.
I do however think that a good structured education may have helped me with certain things however having ti figure things out for myself and build a culture of research has been highly beneficial.
Now it is almost instictive to find a solution to something rather than say “Well they didn’t teach me that in college.”
I agree with the old saying that the “proof is in the pudding.”
I always look for people who can produce great work – I really don’t care how educated they are.
I completed a Diploma In Interactive Digital Media,and we had a Web Design Class in it.But really i learned so much more in a just a few months when i discovered this HUGE online Design/Development Community that the Internet had going on.I mean the course i had was great it gave me the basics of Web Design.But i had really no idea about Semantic Markup ,Valid Code, why shorthand CSS is more efficient.They just didn’t harp on that alot in my course.I learned all of this ONLINE and a lot from here (Nettuts) and Amber Weinberg’s Blog!
I’m not saying one is better from the other,it really comes down to what is best for you.But don’t think just because you choose not to go to School for Design or Development that you can’t get a great Education from Blogs Online ..Your Wrong! But with anything you have to have the drive and determination and at least a little bit of passion about what your learning.Online Blogs are a fantastic and keep me up to date with the latest info about Web Design and so much more.I didn’t really discover this Online Design Community until the end of my first year of my course.I so wish i had of discovered it at the start i think i would of been much further along than now :)
Currently i’m studying Communication and Multimedia design wich also include Graphic Design and Webdesign. I almost always skip every class but just subscribed school to get an formal degree. In Belgium by the way.
How I’d put it -
Want to work in an agency? – Degree required
Want to Freelance? – Self-study
Although all this depends on the quality of your university and you can self-study and have self-motivation
I don’t believe you need a degree to work at an agency because web design is all about the skills. I have clients and they don’t care about any degrees, just that I know how to code.
Just an edit,
Want to Freelance? Self-study OR attending a course.
Hello,
I was an industrial designer, but now I am pursuing a web design job. I haven’t got professional and formal web design training. All my skill comes from industrial design practices. I am thinking going back to college and taking a 8-months program “interactive multimedia”. because I feel there are a lot of things I don’t know. User experience and interface design are so hot. I am trying to knock the door.
does anyone come from Toronto?
thanks.
I have BFA in computer gfx and 3d animation.
Most of my classes were based on adobe CS products for web and design. These classes didn’t teach me a whole lot. Same goes to my 3d classes where i had to use lightwave, maya, softimage and after effects for composting and other stuff :( I had to buy video tutorials online and spend many hours with these. Since the stuff in class was always too basic for me. For the web stuff, i was working a part time job at my university, where i had to produce some graphics for the university. We had a CS guy who was suppose to code all the websites. We been asked to team up and build couple of websites. Most of my web design training came from online. But i never coded any website before. When the CS guy quit, they had no one to work on the websites.I asked my boss if he could give me some of the work time to learn some html and css.
Within 3 days i was able to make great looking website without too much of a hassle. tuts+ premium subscription really helped. Also i noticed how awful the computer science guy was working with css and html… Now i am doing my masters in computer science and working full time as a web developer/designer :)
Haha, there should be an option:
“I was taught by Jeffrey Way”
I have learned so much from the NetTuts video tutorial series (and the ones before that from blogs.themeforest), it’s not even funny.
Personally, I am still in school for engineering (so I have a significant background in Java/C/Python/Matlab/HLA programming), and have always loved design, and always been a tech junkie, so I decided to learn more about web design a few months ago (when I had gotten really bored and was looking for something to fill my time).
I’ve bought several books, but a lot of them are disengaging, like courses. I’ve found I learn best by reading blogs (Jeff Zeldman, Chris Coyier, A List Apart, 456 Berea Street, Web Design Ledger, etc) and watching video tutorials (thus my subscription to Tuts+ Premium!).
I enjoy being a jack of all trades, so I’ve spread myself out pretty thin in terms of web tech, but I’m hoping with time and experience I can become an expert in any or all of them.
I started making sites and such in Flash using actionscript 2 about 2-3 years ago. This was the easiest thing for me to translate from programs like photoshop or illustrator to the web. As I got more interested in web I realized I had to learn HTML and CSS, especially for client projects. I pretty much learned all on the web by looking at tutorials and how other sites were coded. Once I got the basics of html and css i moved on to jquery. I am now currently learning, and pretty proficient, at PHP and MYSQL which I use in virtually every one of my projects now a days.
4 years ago I started a job in a design studio and had design knowledge from that and am currently a freshman at Parsons school of design. I am not totally satisfied with classes. Many of them are too slow, since they have to move with the slowest kid basically, and cover just the basics. I would definitely not pay to take a web design course, since I can learn much more and faster on my own. I think I might end up dropping out for the time being and getting a job as a front end developer and maybe return to school after.
I had formal training in multimedia and graphic design while I was in the Air Force and worked at my first duty station as a multimedia specialist which included doing some web and flash media. At my second duty station, my supervisor, who was a huge web design guru, started teaching me more and more about web design and in particular how the W3C was pushing for standards involving more CSS than use of tables which was still the norm at that time. It was working under him that I really started learning all the ins and outs of web development. The design aspect I was able to transcend from my graphic design experience and education.
I would have to say that the majority of knowledge on web design and development I have learned on my own within the last 3 years. Only because the standards and practices involving the web are constantly changing, so it’s up to you as a designer to stay up-to-date with the current standards, practices and skills. The only downfall I could see about taking classes is that some instructors or professors may not be up-to-date with the current practices and/or prefer to teach old methods.
For example, like the instance I mentioned where a majority of designers still fill the need to teach tables in web design rather than moving on to CSS.
It’s always good to have some fundamental knowledge of past practices, but once you learn them, leave them in the past. Continue forward learning new skills and advancing in your abilities.
I have been working now in the web and printed media field for 8yrs and I love it. Especially designing websites for clients and such. I am still working toward my degree.
I have a school knowledge of procedural programming
but i learned from the on-line resources, because web-designers and web-developers, need to now the new methods and lastest tech
Interesting. There aren’t any classes for learning web development over here in Germany, so I am 100% self taught. I am only 15, so I am kind of the new generation of web designers/developers, only being born in the mid-90s I grew up with the internet. I started about 3 years ago, so there already were a few tutorials out there, but I learned most of my HTML and CSS through tinkering with free templates available on the internet. I’m already looking into courses related to web design, but there isn’t a lot here in Germany. So, I will have to go (on) with self educating.
I’m currently at University studying a web development course, but I’m 100% self-taught. I’m in my second year of Uni, and to be honest, have learnt next to nothing new. I feel what I have learnt could have been much better learnt online/in books and I believe that everything which is being taught that I already know could be taught in a much better way.
Partly, I regret picking this degree. I could have done a Computer Science degree instead, but that’s not what interests me. I feel I should have picked a different degree which I was interested in, something I didn’t know too much about. I’m not convinced the piece of paper I’ll receive in two years will be as valuable as actual experience. But I absolutely do NOT regret going to Uni. It’s a life experience and something I would never have experienced if I went straight into employment, which I very nearly did.
I currently should be studying for my last final of my college career. I am a computer science major but all of the web design stuff I know is self/Envato taught. Having a completed some advanced programming classes it makes the learning process a lot easier.
All my webdesign knowledge is self taught, starting in 2001. Learned a lot from my colleagues as well. I got the job where i’m working at the moment kind of by chance because i don’t have a degree in webdesing/graphics etc. Working part time now, the other time of the day trying to start freelancing…
I’d really love to do a course in graphic desgin in the future, think it’ll help me to push creativity.
I’m 100% self-taught. Well, actually, I tried some courses, but they were SO outdated (for example, in some part it said something like “… but not every browser supports CSS by now, so you should not use it yet”. I mean. WHAT!) I dropped them.
I don’t remember how I started with web design, I think I learned just because I wanted to know how to edit my blog template, hahaha.
Then I started reading and searching tutorials everywhere, and I ended at nettuts (and webdesigntuts now :D). I learned so much from these sites!
I’ll admit I started by simply ripping off sites and/or mimicing what other sites did. Deconstructing others code and copy/pasting as my own. Eventually after doing this enough you learn to make changes to the code to suit your needs and even learn to do it yourself. Starting this method in 8th grade back in ’98 and finally ‘Getting it’ by the end of high school.
High school classes of C++ and Visual Basic was all I needed to get started in PHP/Javascript/Perl and more. As soon as you learn the concepts of one language all become easily adoptable.
I have completed a degree at a university of applied sciences in communication and multimedia design.
I can’t agree with the people that say that self taught is more effective, i find this not entirely true. If you’re teaching yourself you don’t get it learned from 9 to 5 so it will take longer to pick up. Also there’s another key difference in my opinion. You can learn Photoshop, programming and such yourself but some stuff you’ll maybe only pick up in school.
I have learned usability and such in school, i have learned effective marketing, styling and more or less to think different in school. I have learned to take feedback and such in school, not outside school or self-taught.
However i did learn Photoshop, Flash, XHTML, CSS and all the key technical stuff on my own. The difference i guess is more the project oriented stuff, i had to learn that in school. Also stuff like Crawford or Steve Krug is something i had probably never found if it wasnt jammed down my throat by school, as well as effective design with eye tracking and user testing.
This is solely my own experience, your experience could differ but this is how i see school gives you some stuff you cannot or will not find on your own.
Greets,
Kenneth
I’m self-taught. Learned everything by me, and from receiving critiques from people how know more about design than me. I started 3 years ago, and I won’t go to any kind of courses or college.
I can learn better from my-self. Because after all design is a creative field. You need to learn how to be creative, and what can be better than training from yourself?
Good poll, and very interesting results,
Eduardo
I am a high school student. I have taken one class, but not for web design, instead graphic design. So, although that did help me a little in terms of the graphic part of web design, I would not consider that part of my “training.” Therefore, I am 100% self-taught from tutorials and the internet.
Hi.
I’m at Sheffield hallam uni and have taken web system design, the course is part web, part programming discrete maths professionalism and system object oriented design. Understanding how databases work with one to many relationships and how to design efficient systems. You couldn’t learn this stuff being self taught as you wouldn’t know where to start and why would you want to do this? The course is very cleverly thought out about how you should think logically and every subject is based on that theory. For designing big systems and getting the money I think you need to have a degree and a portfolio of sites you have done. The first semester is nearly over and I have learnt a lot about systems and how they work properly for users to get the information. Websites aren’t just a pretty picture there is a lot happening behind the scenes and that is the stuff that is hard to find the tutorials on. How to choose attributes for your entities and what to do when there are many to many occurrences, how to think like a program. I think it is a good decision if you want to learn more than Photoshop or dreamweaver, we do java, SQL, php .net system design all the back end as well as put the front on. So far it is very good.
I came up through the ranks of the “Musician’s Guide to Hacking Up Websites” (also known as the school of hard knocks). I was in several bands that had the inevitable “we need a website” discussion. Do you know how? Not me. Do you? Nope… OK, I’ll give it a shot. I became hooked… spending way too much time with my new hobby.
I spent the first five years or so in MS Front page. Completely WYSIWYG. Then I read CSS For Dummies (which is an awful book, now that I look back on it)… then I literally read about 30-40 other books by “respected authors” (Meyers, Shea, Cederholm, Zeldman, Budd, Clarke, and tons of Sitepoint books) on front end design and development. These were all great for development but Andrew Clarke’s book, Transcending CSS, was the first to really open my eyes to “design.” This made a huge impact on how I approached things.
The story could continue for pages, but I’ll stop here….
I’m currently talking college classes through an online college. I like taking classes because you can get feedback from your teachers and classmates about your projects. I also think that there is something to having a formal education because you are not only learning how to design, but also how to work with people on projects. I also think that learning the basics such as color theory, and work flow are things that are learned well in a classroom environment. I think that my school is pretty good at keeping the curriculum current with the developments in the industry. I feel that because it is primarily online learning that the classes are able to stay current.
I do admit that there are many things that I am self taught such as HTML and CSS, and basic Dreamweaver and Photoshop. I think that a formal education is good to have, but I also supplement my education with web sites such as PSDTuts and NetTuts.
Personally I think that how you learn all depends your mentality. Some people learn better with formal classroom learning and others are better at motivating themselves and learning on their own.
I don’t think it matters how you learn it just so long as you learn it and are able to implement what you have learned successfully. I also think that it’s important to remember that web design is an industry that changes constantly and it is important to stay current regardless of how you originally came to the industry.
Hive five Self-taughts like myself!
Hive Five? hehe – I like it!
I too started in myspace.. way back in 2004 lol
i used other websites designs and would hate the way they would insert their tags like “made by example.com”… so i would scour the code and delete what i thought was the box and kept refreshing my web page to see if i messed up a color or something.
Later i started my own business and tried to save money and tried to make my own website.so after downloading the trial version of dreamweaver cs4 i would make a page and do some floats like what would be explained in youtube videos, but sometimes while inserting a picture the whole right side words would kick down underneath and screw everything up… or when i insert a div and picture halfway up the page would kick out of the wrapper and just be out there somewhere
So i started looking for “professionals” and after hiring some big web design company that seemed legit because they had a greg gumbal commercial on their homepage (haha) and then waiting 6 months while they passed around the site to the guy who does designing, guy who does coding, the guy who does the forum, the guy who design the logo.. and i ended up scared to tell them that i wanted to change something because 7 months had already went by and it would take longer if i wanted to make changes. so the final product wasnt even what i wanted anymore.. bye bye $1500
But even though i got the basic “BASIC” html stuff down.. now i get confused by css… so im watching even more videos (but on better sites like this one instead of youtube) and enrolled in a local community college just to get a firm foundation and find out what i dont know that i think i do about html and css
My new site i have a vbulliten forum, some internal pages that will work like wikipedia and maybe some jquery or something on the home page.
and instead of trying to find someone to trust i figure i need a formal education with all these technologies.. or else im just going to be paying someone every time i want to change the background color of the site (which i know now how to do in css and it changes thm for all pages, thanks css lol).
I hope some if any of all that makes sense :)
Lonnie
I started learning on my own, moving from the days of freewebs nearly seven years ago to database, php, and jquery driven websites. Designing has always been my weakest point though, I’m more of a Jack of All Trades fellow, however this allows me to, for the most part, tackle nearly any web task or problem that comes my way.
I just started at a Technical College, they have a quick 2 year Web Design program. So far I just finished up core classes so soon I’ll see how the “Web” classes go. Im interested to see how they teach us, what they teach us, etc. If its BS, im going to stay in and get my 2 year degree anyways. Stuff on paper looks good to employees, the fact is that a lot of employers require degrees for the web design/dev. field. I think its safe to say you should go to school for it and get a degree, just to say “Hey, I did this, I know what im doing”
But prior to this I have been self taught in everything since I was 11 and made my first Geocities website. All the way up to age 20 ive been self taught and im pretty proud of it. In highschool I took a “Web Design” class and laughed at how little the teacher knew. She literally made us read out of a book from 200 about designing UGLY websites in flash. The worst part is you would ask a question and she wouldn’t know what your talking about. I think a big problem is that most teachers have either no experience, or try to teach out dated methods.
So with it all being said, a formal education is good. You never know, you might learn stuff you dont know. When you get into programming languages like C, Java, I think schooling is a great option too. (graphic design, not so much) If you are young and not in college yet, go to college. With the economy the way it is and the competitiveness of this field, a degree is one more thing to add to your portfolio, trust me it will help.
“Necessity is the mother of invention”
I graduated with a degree in Public Relations whose degree requirements required us to take a design class that taught us the VERY basics of Photoshop, Illustrator, and In-Design. We never even touched anything web-design related.
Then, upon landing my first “real” job at a local nonprofit organization, I was deemed the “Tech-saavy” one. Their website that they had paid far too much money for was totally out of date and had an awful image slider. No one could figure out how to change the scrolling images.
The self-learning began. I managed to change the images :-) and even build them a new site. I have since gained knowledge in leaps and bounds, been astonished at the many web-design resources available, spent some quality time with W3 schools, and been thankful for Jeff Way, Chris Coyier and the likes.
I am by no means a pro, but have managed to build a couple sites from scratch that I am pretty proud of and am constantly learning new things.
Not too bad for a chick with a blow-off major and fairly worthless degree.
I’m currently studying my bachelor in Graphic Design. Honestly I have learned a lot in school, but I find the classes to be too slow. I usually read a lot, books, magazines, blogs and tutorials. And I usually advance beyond the class. I would say I learn more by myself than in any class. But college has also broadened my knowledge and made me take an interest in things I never thought I would like. I started college thinking mostly about learning web design, but now I’m loving the print world too.
I bought a Commodore 64 when I was 30…so that will give you an idea of my age. I’ve taught more web design than I have taken, and there were few design courses when I was in undergrad.
I would certainly suggest design, typography, and MARKETING courses along with coding, especially if you won’t be just the talent side of the equation.
Do you want to be a web designer (that’s my day job–by night I teach English and write fantasy) or do you want to manage the hardware? You need coding for both, but different levels and different kinds of coding. And it’s true, many community college instructors don’t know as much as you do about a given topic–I’ve been one of those instructors, and i’ve helped people learn to do things I couldn’t do. Go figure.
Since I am over-educated, I figure that education is good–it opens doors, but you learn what you learn, and I learn by doing. I’m mostly self-taught, having to do more with my love life (there’s a story!) than with formal education. That being said, if I were 18 instead of 61, I’d be looking for a good school to teach me what I probably don’t have time to learn for the rest of my life.