What are the skills and responsibilities of a web designer?

BFC — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:43:03 GMT

Recently I decided to deepen my knowledge about CSS, reading the book CSS Mastery. This decision was based on the need to create web sites with clean markup, focusing the work of structuring and the look & feel at CSS.

First, I must say that I really enjoyed reading the book. I always saw CSS as being part of the toolbox of a web designer. Let me clarify: I am far away of being a web designer, and to be honest, I was not cut off for the job. But a Web Designer is a must have if you want to succeed doing web sites or web applications.

Let's say that I want to hire a Web Designer to my team: what skills do I have to look for, which distinguish a good web designer? (Comments from web designers are welcome)

One thing I am sure: being just a Designer (not a Web Designer) is not enough for my team. For me, a Designer is someone who knows for example how to work with FreeHand MX, Photoshop, image processing, but has no idea what HTML is, or CSS is, or any other subject related to web. The site that is being produced can even be good looking, but I think the web designer must go further: he has to give me the web template, images, CSSs, etc. More, the Web Designer must understand subjects as Accessibility, or Cross-Browser, Usability, etc. I believe also that there are design types that can be awesome, but they are not for the web. Am I asking too much for a web designer? Don't get me wrong: I am really really out of my comfort zone, since I consider myself as a backend developer (which typically does not work too much with the end user). My question is totally honest!

Why I am posting about this subject? In the moment, my team is configured with a Designer (not a Web Designer), and it was not my decision. Who is trying to fill the gap about web design (html, css, etc,)? We, Web Developers. What is our feeling? That every decision we make (putting a div, a background image, transparencies, etc) is surrounded with the question: are we doing it right? Of course that at the end of the day the job it will be done, with more or less difficulty and errors.

In my opinion, Web Designers are really important to Web Projects and can make the difference about the success or failure of the project. In Web Projects, Web Designers are maybe not sufficient to success, but they are necessary to achieve it.

Again, comments and different visions about the subject are welcome.

BFC