While studying graphic design, you naively worry about two main issues before going pro: your design skills and client fees.
But at some point you venture into the real world and SPLAT, you hit the code wall and your list of concerns gets a bit more complicated.
Suddenly, you find yourself worrying about programming skills, visual code language, the latest graphic software and improved web standards.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am all for continuous education and multi-tasking in a creative job, but try explaining the need for a programmer or for a special graphic application to your client.
Your client doesn’t care about any of your technicalities. The client who paid you to design an original and user-friendly website, blog, social profile, banner, etc. doesn’t care about any of that. Clients want their amazing web presence, they want it cheap and they want it now!
Being a small company or business, you, like your clients, need to stay current while keeping costs down and the best way to succeed at that is to identify what’s holding you back:
Designer Woes
- Specialized Skills
Nowadays, web design requires many different skill sets to meet market demands. If you don’t have them all, or at least most of them, then your options are limited to outsourcing part of the work, learning more skills or turning down the job. Don’t kid yourself, even the sharpest tool in the shed doesn’t work alone.
- web Standards
Like most web designers, you can only try to navigate between Valid XHTML know-how and design & usability requirements. The “good” news is that with time, you can get pretty good at debugging your work code, Just don’t be surprised that you haven’t actually designed anything all week.
- Money Time
It’s not about the price of your new gadget or the time and money you or your parents invested in design school. It’s about supplementing your basic education, it’s about finding and paying specialized freelancers you can trust, and it’s about keeping your portfolio updated with work that requires skills you haven’t learned yet.
- Specialized Skills
You’re about to spend time and money on learning a skill or buying software today that will be outdated before you perfect it. Your client’s request for the latest ‘unfolding directories’, ‘morphing buttons’ or whatever is currently in fashion will send you on a never-ending trend hunt. Try to console yourself with the fact that every trend becomes standard after a while, but your career lasts a lifetime.
- Multi Media Everywhere
We have too many design tools and media services in different places and formats. Videos in youtube, pics in photobukcet, slideshows with flicker, music with playlist – and the list goes on. You have to remember and manage all your usernames and passwords because your media is all over the place in different formats. Then you have to merge, reformat, embed and customize them into your design and ultimately republish it all over again.
Designer Wish List
Now that your issues are exposed, I’d like to sum up this web design predicament with the call: Let designers be designers! Halleluiah!!! And if you’re going to complain, you better know what you want and try to define it to the powers that be:
- Free for All! (*except for premium)
Chris Anderson, the author of The Long Tail and editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine explains the rise of “freeconomics”: how the technologies that power the web should all point in the same direction – to zero, where everything is free, except for premium. I couldn’t agree more. Unless we (the consumers) need some extra volume/options/services for a specific job, we’d like to have free web hosting, free domain names, free document management, free bandwidth, free business services, etc.
- No programming(ers) required
You own the design part of web design, but it would be outstanding if we could simply select and point to create animations, vector characters or any other design components that rely on code or vector studies. This request is about: not needing to learn code + not needing to outsource at all.
- Stay Single
Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a single location for all the media you’ve accumulated throughout the years? One single platform to customize each and every object, text and layer? But it’s not just for you, it’s for your clients as well because after you’ve finished the design stage, you want to hand them the keys to a friendly website manager and let them update it by themselves. Obviously, it’s important for you and your clients to have an all encompassing web presence. So you’ll need one single spot to manage the look and usability of your different web nodes. You want to easily change the look of your website, blog, banner, social profile etc., to add or erase every form of media, and while you’re at it you’d appreciate some customized search, mark & link capabilities, from one single place.
- Give and Take
You want a continuous accumulation and diversification of styles, objects, effects, layers, characters and backgrounds in one design platform. You want a library of mostly royalty free content that also encourages designer contribution (with the exception of needing to pay for specialized design items). You want to strut your design stuff to your peers and vice versa.
Design Aid
It’s not clear if a web designer can get all of the above in one simple and professional place, but I’m not the only one who has taken notice.
Web design solutions are already online, some in part and some in beta. You might want to check some of them out before you start drowning in code:
There are wix and pagii the free flash design platforms that are still in beta, but already offer many functions for web design in one place!
There are others like Weebly and Freewebs that offer simple and functioning design usability for everyone.
There are the e-bays for web design components like flashloaded and istockphoto and the obvious ready-made template sites like templatemonster and flash-template-design
For now, the only thing left for you to do is take advantage of what’s in beta today, and revel in the fact that you don’t have to become something other than a designer.
So go and design something.
Thank you.
Author: Ric Raven
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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