Servage Magazine

In today’s world, web design is not an unchanging subject that can be learnt through fewer resources, nor from just any teacher. Rather, it is an ever changing subject, with daily enhancements. Therefore, choosing the right instructor is an important step towards proper and fast learning. This post is written to help in determining the right teacher if you are a newbie and opting for commercial tutorials or still a student in an university.

Learning Stuff

Keeping pace with the many and sudden changes in web design learning is a daunting task for course preparation. Thus, course instructors are likely experiencing a short supply of what are the most helpful materials to teach students. Consequently, most universities hire two sets of teachers. One set is a permanent staff, who have enough experience to tackle courses intended for newcomers with  zero programming skills. Unfortunately, these professors are often not working in live fields and not creating modern websites for real clients. This then leads them away from the realities and latest trends of modern web designing.

In order to compensate for these deficiencies, most tutorial classes and university courses retain some part-time faculty who are experts in the field, and are creating web designs and applications for real clients. Therefore, they teach students based on their real life experiences and provide the latest knowledge of technologies and tools. In my opinion, these are the real teachers to learn about web design for real world clients.

These days, most contemporary websites consist of the latest markup: HTML 5 and CSS 3, so it is mandatory for us to select the instructors who are proficient in both, plus have the ability to transfer their real world knowledge to their students. I  have intentionally specified these technologies first, because today, hardly anyone is creating wireframes and prototypes in graphic design software like Photoshop or Fireworks. Instead, they tend to use HTML and CSS to make dynamic and interactive mockups to convey their intricate ideas to clients. Therefore, as a foundation, these technologies are essential. Moreover, good command over JavaScript and jQuery as well as Ajax is a must in the highly competitive environment of web development. Without these scripting methods, you can’t fully understand the modern trends of web development.

Knowledge

However, knowledge of graphic design software is equally important. Without pixel perfect images, we can’t provide things like great user experiences and accurate CSS where you need to scale websites using background images and other elements such as color, size and white spaces. Therefore, you need to select teachers who are proficient with graphic design software and are capable of creating entire websites from scratch if needed. This is preferable to using commercial templates on the web.

You set yourself up for failure if your teacher lacks knowledge of positive and negative spaces, responsive designing, fonts and other navigational elements. Your chosen instructors should have enough understanding of grid-based layout preparations and its coding, CSS3 selectors, as well as standard coding techniques to optimize code for performance. Perfect knowledge of handy tools for effective coding and knowledge of open source to make projects cost-effective are some prerequisites for smart course providers.

References & More Reading

Teaching Web Design To New Students In Higher Education
A DESIGNER’S PLEA Why Should Web Design Be A Profession?
Group Interview: Expert Advice For Students and Young Web Designers