Awwwards have come up with a really useful list of free fonts. I may have gone a bit over the top and downloaded most of them!
I’m really looking forward to playing with some of these. Particularly Sofia, Cabin, Banda, Sansita One, Dekar, Rex and Piron.
When I first started teaching myself HTML and CSS I went to W3Schools and read through their documentation. I found it really gave me a grasp of the basics and it’s “Try it yourself” editor was ideal for my style of learning. It’s still my first port of call when I need a quick answer to a simple question.
But since I started using this site I’ve heard a lot of people refer to it as outdated and recommending HTML Dog instead. So it’s definitely worth checking that out as an alternative.
So, you’ve decided you want to learn web design and development but where do you start?
I imagine you’ve done your own research seen lots of articles from people talking about more advanced subjects and you’ve realised there’s a lot more to it than you first suspected.
So I tried to pick apart the information I have absorbed and found that there are essentially two different elements of web design. Designing and Coding. This seems obvious but it’s worth pointing out.
Each of these are essential to anyone hoping to be a successful web designer but to the outsider they look like such differing skills. At the far ends of the spectrum I assume this to be true; but there is a huge intersection where both designing and coding use the same skills. Namely creativity and logic.
If someone asked me if I was creative and logical I would answer, fairly confidently, that I am. If I was then asked if I was artistic it would be a definitive “no”. Due to this I feared the design theory element would be a massive challenge and not really of interest to me. But having read some excellent articles and the outstanding Non-Designers Design Book I found design theory to be truly fascinating. It is now an area that I look forward to studying and I appreciate design as much more than making pretty things.
Having said that, I doubt I will ever produce websites as visually stunning as an out and out designer could, but lets hope I’m proven wrong.
All the same, if you want to be a web designer you are going to need a strong grounding in both design and coding and this grounding should be built upon strong knowledge of:
I feel 1-4 of this list are self explanatory but some may be surprised to see Communication Skills on this list.
To be honest it’s not something I would have considered until having it’s importance clarified whilst listening to Mule Design’s excellent ‘Let’s make mistakes’ podcast. It has made it very clear to me that artistry, research and coding genius count for naught if you are unable to build a strong relationship with the client.
So, having given a broad breakdown of the essential areas I will provide further information as I learn starting with posts on HTML and CSS.
I will continue sharing my experiences and findings as I progress. If you have anything to add, question or just chat about please drop me a tweet, @thewebologist, or email me about anything you would like to discuss and I will post any relevant information that comes from this.
So, I did it. I finally went and built a website. I’ve been threatening it for sometime and it’s actually come to fruition… but what now? I suppose I should share my plan and see if I can get anyone on board.
I am going to use this site to document my experiences of learning Web Design and Development and share them with you. When I first started learning, around August of 2011, I was completely awestruck by the density of information and at a loss as to how it all fit together, what I needed to know, and how much of it I needed to know before I actually started to release websites.
I searched (with no success) for a site that would give me a simple guide of the differing elements and dreamt of a step by step plan to getting my dream job. It’s now obvious why I couldn’t find either of these resources. It’s not easy to explain what goes into making websites, and it’s an ever expanding art form. So if you were foolish enough to try your advice would soon be outdated.
But that’s not going to stop me having a go at providing at least some guidance from the knowledge and experiences I pick up along the way.
How am I going to do this?
I’m going to build a list of essential resources and write general blog posts about my experiences/challenges/findings and random thought-nuggets. I will couple this blog with a twitter stream that has less essential, but still worthy, links as well as smaller but equally beautiful thoughts that enter my ever expanding vault of web knowledge.
As I’m still very new to this I expect to make mistakes along the way and I hope you will help me to learn from these.
Please drop me a tweet, @thewebologist, or email me about anything you would like to discuss and I will post any relevant information that comes from this.