Getting started.

There are quite a few guides, tutorials, books, I don't know what else to help you to become a web designer. Well, most of them are just not really useful, because they lack a depth required to make your reading worthwhile.

If you want to become a web designer you should know what's involved. So these tutorials should help you start making your own pages and will also provide a sound base of knowledge, so that you know where to go from here (and there is a whole lot of information on the webIGN site).

All right, lesson no. 1. What is web design.

It might be that you do not want to be a designer. You might just want to make a family site or any other one-off experience. Then you may safely omit this lesson and dive straight into the practice. It's like driving -- if you want to become a professional you will either have to know your car inside out or you'll have to be a part of a team, together with mechanics. But if you simply want to drive to and from work, you just need to know how to drive.

Hopefully this makes it clear.

Web design? It's for tech-nerds?

Well, what is web design? Actually, the wording gives you the answer. First of all it is... design! Yeah, you might say that I am being stupid, of course it is design. It says so. But you will be surprised how many people do not realise this small fact. Web design is about design. It is not that much about coding, knowing HTML and JavaScript, CGI and Perl. All this stuff (you don't need to know what it is for know, let's just say it's something difficult and extremely technical) is just a tool. What matters is a "creative mind" as they say.

Let me give you an example. Take Leonardo Da Vinci. Do you think that if we would take his brushes and pencils (and whatever else he used) he would not be able to be one of the Greatest artists? So creative thinking (don't e-mail me asking if you have it, how would I know?) is the most important part of web design.

Of course you do not need to be a Leonardo Da Vinci clone (would it be a successful business to clone Leonardo using his DNA several times and then enslave the clones and make them design web pages?). It would help if you're the greatest artist, but you can get away without being one.

There are many people in web design business who do not realise that to design a web page one needs just as much sense of style as if one was creating a movie or drawing a picture. But because a web designer should be highly technologically advanced (unless he/she uses an horde of freelancers) most "artistic" people do not go to web design. Technologically advanced might know every tool out there that can be used to design web pages, such a person might know everything about the Web, but still his/her pages will look as ugly as... well, as most pages do.

Do I have what it takes to be a web designer?

If you're not scared by technology and are still a "creative" person, then web design might be the answer for you. Even if you're at the lower end of the "creativity" spectrum, you still can design great pages. So don't worry, if you really want to design, you will. Yeah.

Now, how can you compete with (it seems) a million of other freelance designers? I will talk about starting as a web designer later on, in later lessons. For now, there is just one sound advice. Learn, learn, learn (That's the quote from Lenin, by the way).

Because if you're not good at drawing cartoons, for example, you can more than offset this by learning how to use other web design tools. And there are many. Next lesson will be on the designer tools.

Where do I start?

Well, surprisingly enough, you already did. There's even more news. You can become a web designer, you can create great pages without actually buying anything! Although some expense will help. Internet is a great thing, and it has many resources which are all free for you to use (or to throw away).

The worst thing about the Internet is finding things. And in this webIGN will help you a lot. I think that we at webIGN have almost everything on web design. But it's not because we are so good or so kind to give it all away. No, most of the resources are links to other Internet sites. When you're through with webIGN, you will be able to navigate the web on your own with ease. You will be able to provide help to other people, beginners just as you are today.

So, web design is not like "programming with graphics", it's more like "graphics and style with programming". If you want to become a professional designer, expect to work hard. And because technology changes so fast (first IBM PC was released in 1981!) you will never be able to stop learning (well, if you get rich, you can hire employers and live off your share dividend). If this scares you off, do not stop reading (I should have said that in the beginning, I suppose), I wanted it to sound a bit SCARY!

All right, now let's do something more practical and useful, let's talk about design tools.

Just click here to go to the next lesson, Starting your own web design studio.