So you’re building a website and you’ve decided to ask yourself the question, ‘What type of designer do I need to build it?’ The word designer has come to mean many things. The person who styled your dress – designer. The person who picked out your furniture – designer. Even the person responsible for figuring out the plumbing layout in the new development down the road – designer. Designers are everywhere, which makes figuring out who to hire for what job a little tricky.
Today we’re going to explain which designers you might want to employ to build a website and what they do.
Graphic Designer
This is the person who will be responsible for the look and feel of your brand. They’ll be able to create colourful impactful imagery to wow your users and visitors. Their responsibility is to create a brand identity, which means crafting logos, selecting fonts and deciding on colours & styles. They will often be skilled not only in combining and transforming existing imagery using manipulation software like Adobe Photoshop, but also in handling illustration software like InDesign to make unique assets for your business.
Main Task: Visual Assets & Branding
Web Designer
Your web designer is responsible for the look and feel of your site, which should mirror that of your branding. This type of designer will be able to take all your branded assets and create colourful impactful imagery, page by page, to wow your users and visitors. Firsty, every element on your website, from the headings to the Call-To-Action buttons, will be styled by your web designer.
Web designers are experienced in ensuring all assets are technically advantageous for web. For instance, it means using assets of the right file size and dimensions to maintain the technical efficiency of your website (e.g. pages load quickly, images line -up across devices etc.). Your Web designer should be familiar with HTML and CSS programming languages to allow them to convert page designs into the code read by your internet browser.
Main Task: Page Styling & Front-End Development
User Experience Designer
Making sure every interaction counts is extremely important in converting people who land on your website into customers. To make this happen, you’ll want to employ a user-experience (UX) designer. They’re responsibility is to create customer journey maps for user experiences that is streamlined and easy to use. By crafting engaging user interactions and building an intuitive click-by-click customer journey, this type of designer’s main goal is to enhance customer satisfaction with your web experience, ultimately generating sales and leads.
Main Task: Interaction & User Journey Optimisation
The Big Picture
Today there exists many overlaps between design fields. It is not surprising to find user experience designers who are adept at branding or graphic designers who can code HTML. Whether you have one designer, or several, you’ll want to cover all your bases. From a design perspective, this means ensuring you have at least one person who has expertise in the following:
- Graphics and branding
- User interaction and customer journeys
- HTML and CSS
To talk to a specialist about designing a website for you brand, speak to us today.
