A web designer or website designer is really a general term to acknowledge an individual who build websites in their job. Being called a website designer doesn’t nominate you as a specialist or does it denominate you as a designer for the Internet. There are different types of web designers now that each of them have a specialize field.
I’ve found a few types of web designers and hopefully you’ll be able to find which you belong to or want to follow on your journey of being a successful web designer.
Let’s start with the Web Artist or the designer who creates the visual face of a website. The artist should be proficient in photo-editing software to create, edit and produce images to be used on a website. He designs the website following design principles learned in school and aims to make the visual experience of a website into a different type of design.
The User Interface Designer or the UI Designer sounds like a designer who handles the visual front of a website like the web artist but should be regarded as someone with a better understanding of the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Graphical User Interface (GUI). The UI Designer designs the user interface of a website or any application that requires a UI for that matter based on very different factors compared to the web artist. He designs based on the psychology, baheviour patterns and various other human concepts in order to come up with the perfect interface to be used.
In my own words, I look at a UI Designer as someone who knows purely about usability. One such person everyone should know is Jakob Nielsen.
The Interaction Designer is related to the UI Designer but can stand on its own as well. Wikipedia explains that;
Interaction design (IxD) is the branch of user experience(UX) design that illuminates the relationship between people and the machines they use. While interaction design has a firm foundation in the theory, practice, and methodology of traditional user interface design, its focus is on defining the complex dialogues that occur between people and interactive devices of many types-from computers to mobile communication devices to appliances.
From my understanding of the above paragraph, it looks like Interaction Design is the father of UI Design. Who’s your daddy?!
Other than the cosmetic specialist and the professor, we’ve also got the Information Architect. He’s a designer in his own right but he deals mainly with structuring and organizing levels of content. He’s the librarian of a team that makes sure a clients website uses suitable labels. If we combined an Information Architect and Copywriter, that’ll be a sw33t (sweet) deal.
The other type of designers you will find are Logo Designers, Pixel Artist, Icon Designers and etc. There are many types of web designers and they all can’t fulfill each of the design roles today. So what do they do?
They evolve and adapt the other required designer roles into their responsbilities. It’ll take additional time to master but at least the designers get somewhere with all this knowledge.
I actually set up a discussion on Sitepoint about What Type of Designer am I? and I got really good replies from it.
But have you figured what type of web designer are you?