How to Become a Web Designer Without a Degree

While having a degree isn’t a formal requirement for becoming a Web Designer, it is the most common route for professionals looking to work in the field. This is because a lot of training and practice is required, so it helps to learn these skills in a controlled classroom environment. However, if you don’t have a college degree, fret not. You can still find work as a Web Designer, you’ll just need to take a different path to prepare yourself for the job market.

Can You Really Become a Web Designer Without a Degree?

While some jobs will prioritize applicants with a college degree over others, there is no real reason that lacking a college degree will keep you from becoming a Web Designer. Likewise, having a degree in an unrelated field can still be useful, though additional focused training will still be necessary. While the path to a professional career will be different, there is nothing stopping a dedicated non-college graduate from finding work as a Web Designer.

Step #1: Learn About Web Designer Field

The first step in becoming a Web Designer is simply learning about the field and the career path. Noble Desktop provides students with a number of free resources, including an exhaustive selection of articles on the Web Designer Career Hub page, to help students become familiar with the life of a Web Designer before they commit to this as a future career path. In these articles, you can learn about the kinds of tools Web Designer uses, what kinds of projects they can expect to work on, and what they can expect from entry-level positions, including job responsibilities and starting salaries.

Step #2: Learn Web Designer Skills

After you’ve committed to working to become a Web Designer, the most important early step will be receiving the training that you need in order to work in the field. Web Design is a fairly varied career path, so there are a number of different skills you’ll need to learn. Competitive Web Designers should have a background in visual design and composition, they should know how to use industry-standard design software like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Figma, and they should have basic HTML/CSS and JavaScript skills. While this may seem like a massive collection of skills, eventually, most designers will end up specializing in one or more elements of the design process, making advanced training more clear and focused.

One great way to pick up these skills is to enroll in Noble Desktop’s Web Design Certificate program. This career-focused skills training program is designed for students who don’t have advanced web design training and aims to teach students all of the important skills they will need in order to start a successful web design career. Students will learn all of the important design applications, including Figma and the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of tools, and they will learn the basics of coding in HTML/CSS and JavaScript. In addition to receiving essential, hands-on skills training, students enrolled in this course will be able to take advantage of important career professionalization services, including one-on-one mentorship sessions and portfolio-building exercises.

Step #3: Get Experience in Web Designer Projects

While a formal training program is a great way to get hands-on experience, it can’t completely substitute the much longer process of gaining experience in a college degree program. This means that anyone looking to give themselves a leg-up on the job market will want to find other venues for gaining experience to put them on par with other applicants. Aspiring designers might want to consider volunteer work if it is available, but they should also be careful to protect their own time and labor so as to not give away too much for free simply to build a slightly larger design portfolio. Students can also mock up their own web design projects during their free time in order to stay in practice with basic skills like HTML/CSS.

Another way to get hands-on experience is to enroll in a shorter skills-focused focused bootcamp through Noble Desktop. These bootcamps will take significantly less time than a career-granting certificate program, but they will still provide students with the chance to get hands-on experience designing aspects of a web project that mirror the work that they can expect to do in their real-world professional experiences. These bootcamps also provide students with focused instruction in a single skill, like Figma or Photoshop, which means that students who feel that they have a gap in their training can focus on the thing they want more experience working on. 

Step #4: Develop a Web Designer Portfolio

Once you are comfortable with your training and experience and feel ready to start building your job materials, the most important thing to consider is how you are going to construct your professional portfolio. This portfolio is used to demonstrate your skills, style, and abilities to prospective employers, and it is one of the more significant parts of your job application materials. This portfolio will demonstrate to employers that you can put your training into practice and that you are ready to start producing design work that rises to a professional standard.

There are a number of different concerns that go into creating a portfolio. Noble covers most of these in their web designer portfolio article, but the most important aspect of a portfolio is ensuring that it conveys your unique voice as a designer and that it puts your best foot forward. It will be essential that you work on your portfolio and that you receive feedback on this work. By enrolling in a career-certificate program through Noble Desktop, you will receive guided instruction in portfolio building as part of your professional development instruction and you will get one-on-one career mentorship seminars during which you can get personalized feedback on your portfolio.

Step #5: Build a Web Design Network

Another important element of preparing to work as a Web Designer is building a professional network of designers, developers, and professional references who can help you find a job. Not only will you need to find professional references who can vouch for your skills as a designer, but you will also want to have a coherent cohort of professionals you can turn to for advice and for assistance on things like mock interviews, portfolio questions, or tips on finding job listings. Building a network of designers is particularly important for Web Designers because many designers you work with will have unique enough styles and voices that they can leverage to assist you and collaborate with you on projects or other job-related processes.

While universities are great places to build a network of connections, students enrolling in a career certificate program will also be positioned alongside like-minded students and expert instructors who can help build these connections. As with most of these concerns, the main disadvantage of a career-certificate program (in regards to things like networking building) is that they are more accelerated, leaving less time for students to build connections because they are busy building skills. However, in Noble’s career certificate programs, students will have time to work on professional development skills (including networking), and they will work one-on-one with instructors who may be able to help them with some of their concerns.

Step #6: Apply for Web Designer Jobs

Once you are fully comfortable with your job materials, you can start applying for jobs in the industry or begin work on freelance design projects. While finding job listing can be challenging, once you have the relevant materials, it is simply a matter of putting yourself out there and waiting for responses to enter the next stage of the application process.

Another route to take is finding potential employment and design experience working as a freelance Web Designer. These designers will build their own collection of clients and design projects, giving them added control over the kinds of work they take on. They will have to manage a lot of the logistical and administrative tasks, such as building a network of clients, that studio designers won’t have to handle.

How to Become a Freelance Web Designer

An alternative route for making a career in the web design industry is building a name for yourself as a freelance Web Designer. These self-employed Web Designers account for over 10% of the overall total of professional Web Designers. Freelancing will require more upfront administrative work on the part of a designer but will pay dividends later on by giving designers more control over the kinds of work they are asked to do.

While freelance design can be difficult, it can also be a deeply rewarding career path to follow. Read on to learn more about how to become a freelance Web Designer.

What is a Web Designer?

Web Designers are creative professionals who are tasked with designing the layout and assets for webpages and mobile applications. They are creative professionals who are responsible for designing evocative and visually appealing web designs for their clients, and they will work on a diverse range of different projects. They tend to be well-rounded creatives who use both creative software applications and programming knowledge to design and build web applications. Using software applications such as Figma or Adobe XD, web designers will construct the appearance and feel of both the visual and functional elements of a webpage before handing that design off to web developers who will make the design a reality. At smaller firms, a Web Designer may also be expected to work on the programming side of a web design project, so most Web Designers learn the basics of HTML/CSS and JavaScript.

Web designers are most commonly employed by design firms that contract their service to clients, though many work as self-employed freelancers or work in-house for large businesses that are regularly building or updating web applications. They will most frequently work as part of large teams of designers and developers when working on large projects, but they may also find themselves working on individual smaller assignments, particularly if they are working as freelancers. Web Designers may specialize in working on specific elements or aspects of webpages or digital applications, such as building user interfaces or working on the tactile elements of a webpage to build a positive user experience.

What is Web Design Freelancing Like?

Freelance Web Designers will have to balance two important aspects of their job in order to succeed. On one hand, they will need to be skilled designers who can handle all phases of the design process. For most designers, this will mean needing to learn slightly more complex computer programming skills and learning how to build all of the aspects of a user interface. However, freelance designers will have significantly greater control over the kinds of design projects that they work on and will have much greater creative freedom and control over the finished product they deliver to clients.

On the other side of the equation, Freelance Web Designers will need to handle all of the administrative and outreach aspects of working on design projects. Most notably, freelance designers will need to locate their own clients, negotiate contracts and rates, and handle the administrative processes of collecting payment, managing logs, and recording financials. This can be daunting for new designers, especially those without a deep pool of professional contacts to draw from. These aspects of the job will eventually fade into the background as you become more used to them, but they can be burdensome at the start of your career. 

Is Web Design Freelancing Right for Me?

Whether or not to work as a freelance Web Designer is a big decision, and there isn’t really a correct answer for aspiring Web Designers.

Freelancing is great for anyone who wants to have a significant amount of control over what kinds of work they take on and when they work. One of the stresses of entry-level designer jobs is that you don’t really have control over the kinds of assignments you receive, and you’ll have to work on a design assignment regardless of whether you can muster the creative energy. Freelancers will have more power to turn down contracts and commissions (to a degree), freeing them up to work on projects that they want to work on. In addition, freelance designers will have more freedom to work on their own schedule since there is less of a direct obligation to get work done during the business day. 

Freelancing does place a lot of extra responsibilities on the designer, particularly during the start-up phase. While a studio designer may not enjoy all of the assignments they are working on, those assignments are handled by someone else. Freelance designers will need to build their own clientele, which can be a challenge for new designers. In addition to this, there are a number of other minor administrative tasks, particularly related to personal finances, that freelancers will need to either take care of themselves or outsource. Finally, freelance designers are far more likely to run up against deadlines since there is only one point of failure that can cause delays. This will be a larger problem early on since new freelancers won’t have the experience to anticipate these kinds of issues.

A good freelance Web Designer needs to be a versatile designer who can handle all the stages of a project. In addition, they need to be personable enough to work with clients, and they need to be patient enough to wait for their careers to start to take off.

Steps to Become a Freelance Web Designer

Students interested in becoming Web Designers may want to understand the processes that they need to go through in order to find a career in the industry. While this is going to vary from individual to individual, there are a few common hurdles that every aspiring designer will have to jump over in order to find a high-paying job. These include everything from starting off your education to building your job materials to mastering the interview process.

Determine your path

The first step of the process won’t simply be deciding whether or not web design is the right fit for your needs but also determining what kind of web design you want to specialize in. While new Web Designers may want to become well-rounded designers and developers, some students may decide early on that specialization is the route they want to take. These students will then want to build their training path around ensuring that they prioritize the skills that they plan to specialize in.

A few examples of specializations include those that emphasize graphic design, web development specializations, and UX design specializations. Graphic design specialists will need further training in visual art and composition, particularly programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Figma. Designers specializing in development will want to learn more complex coding languages and more versatile programming frameworks. Anyone hoping to specialize in user experience design will need to learn research skills and methodologies of testing human behavior.

Students who are unsure whether or not they want to specialize in any given aspect of the field may want to consider taking advantage of a free online training program. These programs, such as the free seminars offered through Noble, won’t provide you with the depth of knowledge necessary for professional web design work, but they will give you a taste of the kinds of work you’ll be expected to do if you enter into these career fields.

Get Trained

The next and most important step is to receive the technical and skills training that you will need to work as a professional Web Designer. While most students receive this training in a four-year bachelor’s degree program, many talented developers find alternative ways of achieving this training. One excellent place to receive this training is through a professional skills development course, such as Noble’s Desktop’s Web Design Certificate program. In these training programs, students will learn the skills they need to become professional Web Designers, and they will be setting themselves up for future success.

Noble also offers training courses, in the form of short bootcamps and career-certificate programs, that teach students more specialized skill sets. These include Noble’s Web Development, Graphic Design, and User Experience Design courses. Some of these classes have requirements and prerequisites, while others are open to the public. Regardless of your course selection, however, these classes will help build your skill set to make you attractive to potential employers.

Learn Business Skills

Beyond learning the technical design skills required of a Web Designer, freelancers will need to learn business skills. This includes the significant legal skills that will keep your business on the up and up (like contract law and tax law), as well as marketing skills necessary to draw customers who will contract you for freelance work. It can be rocky at first, getting the hang of running a business, even if you are working through a third-party firm or consultant to help find contract work.

While the legal explainers are plentiful, students interested in learning how to market themselves may want to consider enrolling in one of Noble’s Digital Marketing Courses or Social Media Marketing Courses. These classes are a good way to learn the basics of digital marketing to help you build your own web presence as a freelance designer. Importantly, these classes will also help you learn how to make and design websites built with advertising or SEO in mind, which can help improve your desirability in the design marketplace.