web design or develop? what skills?

the more strings to your bow the more options you have. From reading interviews with employers I believe many would prefer the candidate that has more skills (even if they dont require those skills) but of course you would need to be strong in the areas they require.

So being super advanced in the area you want to pursue is good but it should be backed up with strong skills in other areas. Some skills are pretty much a given for any designer or developer any way such as html and css (plus javascript)

Thanks for your reply, that makes sense. I do freelance web design just now but learning so much stuff to get big website up and running from the scratch is quite hard. Im good at coding but have problem with designing... Can't find solution to be better designer rather than developer. Or maybe Im just not creative? ...

I think everyone is bent towards a certain thing, I know I certainly am. Personally, my degree is in Product Design. I love it. But I really enjoy being a jack of all trade. My education is everywhere from Product or Industrial design, graphic design, print and publication, photography, mechanical engineering... as the big chunks of it. I've been picking web development more and more.

I'm a lot more of a designer at heart so my challenge is always coding what I want to design.

I think have your specialty, one thing you are just incredibly good at. That one thing you would do for free. And than work on being better than average at everything else.

If you're a web developer...and you love coding and are great at it, be better than average at photography, better than average at Illustrator and Photoshop, better than average at user experience design, better than average and graphic design, color theory, weight and balance, etc.

Being well rounded, and better than average at those supporting skills, will make you excel even more at that one or two things you are naturally good at.

Just my .02

have you tried studying design principles and graphic design?. There are lots of free course online.Many people underestimate the design side of things - that will require plenty of study also and is harder to do well than people think.

Im reading a book called "White Space is Not Your Enemy: A Beginner's Guide to Communicating Visually through Graphic, Web and Multimedia Design" at the moment to help with that side of things. You might want to check it out on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009OYZ8CS?ie=UTF8&ref_=oce_digital

Maybe you are better suited to the development side of things though and not design - you will probably be the best judge of that. Many companies. especially as they get larger, split out the design side and development side. On the other hand there are lots of independents that wear both hats and do so very well.

Phil Rice Completely agree!

In analogy of a car, you could have the fast, smoothest running, most reliable car ever, but if it doesn't look good, feel good sitting in it, nobody will want to drive it.

But put together the total package, runs good and looks good, now you've got a winner.

I work for a company of about 30, and am solely responsible for the design and development of everything we put out. Web, social media, print, everything.

I personally want to take both the Web Designer and Web Developer Courses, so that way your good at everything and i am also taking Graphic Design Courses because i want to learn how to make logos for companies, which you have to learn Illustrator,Photoshop and Indesign that way you have everything to offer to a company and you can also do print, i think i personally like designing but i just started coding and its going good so far.

So yeah :)

i spend quite a bit of time searching for design trends of 2013, best web designs etc and looking at others work.It can really help when your trying to bring an idea together. From my experience (working in a large corporate research and dev division - with a large design dept) im sure most designers spend a lot of time doing this also to help keep themselve up to date with the way things are going (maybe Kevin Korte can confirm this )

I spend a ton of time looking at others work. Every project. I find other companies or people who have put out something I like, and try to break down the elements that I like about it, and see how I can implement those elements, styles, or ideas into my own work.

I think it's imperative to draw inspiration from other designers. There is a clearly drawn line between coping, and being inspired by.

I find my inspiration in three ways.

Google searches that lead me to various articles.

This website -> http://365awesomedesigners.com/

And the design section of Pinterest is surprising a great place to draw really random inspiration and ideas from. And the bonus is that it's always changing since it's user generated.

I would say on average I spend 25% or more of my project deadline time just gathering inspiration and creating a game plan.

There was the problem, I did learn all principles of design, user experience and stuff, but when it comes to working in photoshop all my ideas start to look crap. Whatever I wanted to design it just looks good on paper, is there any good tutorial about modern graphics design? Also I do look at other peoples website to seek inspiration but then I start to feel that I use somebody else design not mine.. That makes me feel even worse web designer.

It sounds like your photoshop skills aren't high enough to be able to build in photshop what you see in your head or on paper? Is that correct.

I use this site a lot: http://psd.tutsplus.com/

Otherwise, psd is a little bit of a painful program to learn. But the more you use it, the better you get.

As far as feeling like you are stealing others work. You should have a decent understanding of design principals, and that's what you want to look at. Copying their design would be copying their source code.

But looking at color patterns spacial layout, controls, white space, image layout...and emulating that...I've got no problem with it.

But otherwise, good design is just good design. No need to re-invent the wheel, just design and build your own unique looking wheel.

Yes that is correct, I have thousand of great ideas in my head but when it comes to building in Photoshop it starts to break ..

Maybe you're right, maybe I need to learn a bit more of a Photoshop to create those masking effects etc, I see people using those for bg's and stuff "which looks nice"

Thanks for help by the way

You're welcome!

PSD is such a powerful tool, it's not user friendly. But when you start learning more of the fundamentals of it, you will be able to create some really awesome stuff.

That was my weak point. I'm still not a pro at it, but I'm getting pretty darn good at photoshop. I'm sure you can do the same

Do you have any examples of your Photoshop skill implemented in Website? Can I see ?

Yeah i think you probably need to practice Photoshop more, I personally enjoy photoshop a lot I think it's fun and its not hard to learn at all, I enjoy making lettering logos on it, i'm not a pro either but i'm getting the hang of it, and i think its a lot easier that coding. :)

I got some of my Lettering Logos Here on My Portfolio Site : http://pablolitardo.foliohd.com

Hope You Like :)

Not too much. At lease not a lot of my cooler projects I did in school. That should be changing in a few weeks hopfully, and I'll try to remember to post a link when I can.

A lot of my photoshop work lately has been color correction, creating custom textured repeating background images, color palette creating, etc.

The best I can show right now is on a business Facebook page I manage. That can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/JmcMotorsports

Look through the images for the last 6-7 months, cover pic, etc. Some have been not so good, others good. The current cover pic was tweaked in PSD.

Tomasz Grabarczyk I think it's good to have a rudimentary knowledge of many things, but just due to how long it takes to become a Master at something, you might only achieve that top level in a few things - which is totally OK. But the more that you understand when dealing with other people on your team, the better it will be.

My advice is let yourself gravitate towards the things that you enjoy doing the most, and make an effort to learn reasonably well some other things related to those. At the same time, there will be things that you probably will have to force yourself to learn.

The Web is so big that no one can know it all, so choose to do work in the areas that you want to do more work in.

Tomasz Grabarczyk I think it's good to have a rudimentary knowledge of many things, but just due to how long it takes to become a Master at something, you might only achieve that top level in a few things - which is totally OK. But the more that you understand when dealing with other people on your team, the better it will be.

My advice is let yourself gravitate towards the things that you enjoy doing the most, and make an effort to learn reasonably well some other things related to those. At the same time, there will be things that you probably will have to force yourself to learn.

The Web is so big that no one can know it all, so choose to do work in the areas that you want to do more work in.

Thanks a lot everyone for help, I think I will stick to what I really want to do, which is Responsive Design / PHP and Wordpress Themes.

We'll see what comes next :)

hey Ben Jakuben,

I'm sorry this is a little off topic. But I have a couple of questions.

1. I am using PhoneGap to create my Android application because I've heard it the fastest way. I don't know if you know of PhoneGap but basically it coverts HTML, CSS and JavaScript into an application that runs on multiple devices. The issue I've got is that I am using expansion files and I can't seem to find a way to reference the contents of my expansion file within HTML. (basically I want to be able to play videos from the expansion files)

2. Continuing from question 1 - If I'm not able to figure question 1 out, my plan is to create the application natively. Basically the application needs to have a list that links to multiple "Pages" with different content on them. Can you explain what I would need to create this style of Application.

Thank you very much for your time and expertise.

I'm pretty new to Android, so I am sorry if I haven't made myself very clear.

Hey Josh Savage, I'm happy to chime in!

I don't have any experience with PhoneGap so I can't speak directly from experience. PhoneGap and tools like it are good for lots of apps, but there are definite limitations. It sounds like you may be running into one, though again I can't say for sure. There are some good articles about the pros and cons of hybrid tools like PhoneGap vs native, but here's a super high-level overview:

Pros

• Cross-platform (one code base)
• Leverage existing web technology skills

Cons

• Hybrid tools lag behind native in regards to the latest features. New stuff and certain hardware capabilities are unavailable in hybrid tools
• You miss out on platform-specific conventions. For example, if you develop an app with iOS navigation styles in mind, it doesn't "fit" with Android conventions like the Action Bar and physical back button
• In my experience, tools get you 95% cross-platform compatible, but you still run into annoying issues getting things to work correctly on both iOS and Android

When possible, I recommend going native. It's not always possible or necessary, though. Every app needs to be evaluated independently.

I'll try to answer question 2 as best I can without knowing too much about your app. A list would probably be represented in a ListView (see the Blog Reader Android project). Tapping on a row in the list would open up a different page where you could load whatever content you want based on the app. Again, in the Blog Reader project, we tap and link to a separate page (it's called an Activity in Android) that displays blog posts inside a WebView (kind of like an iframe). If you are playing videos from the list, you could actually very easily link to an external video player using something called an Intent that sends you over to whatever video player is installed on the device.

Hope this helps!