What Skills Should UI Designers Have?
UI Designers must be good, empathetic communicators in order to do their job well. Other soft skills UI Designers will find necessary are persuasion and social proofing, customer service, and teamwork. For the most part, UI designers won’t need to be proficient coders but they will need to be able to communicate their technical needs to developers. They’ll also need to be proficient in Invision, Photoshop, Axure, Sketch, and Illustrator, though the choice of which software to use might depend on the individual Designer or employer.
Above all else, UI Designers need to have a grasp on design and design theory. This includes branding, visual design, color, typography, layouts, research, interactivity, and some animation. Some UI Designers might specialize in mobile applications, specific tech stacks (programming language and tool combinations), or industries. All UI Designers must understand empathetic and accessible design concepts to serve their user-base properly.
Learn the Skills You Need to Become a UI Designer
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Graphic Design
Graphic design is the creation of visual content to communicate a message. Graphic design uses visual hierarchy, typography, photo editing, spacial awareness, empathy, color theory, and more to create visually appealing and communicative images. Graphic design can be done with software like Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, Figma, and Sketch.
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Visual Design
Visual design is a set of strategic best practices used to improve a design or product's aesthetic appeal and usability through the selection of appropriate images, typography, use of space, hierarchy, color, and layout.
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Sketch
Sketch is a design platform used to create, share, and collaborate prototypes and wireframes.
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HTML & CSS
HTML is Hypertext Markup Language and CSS is Cascading Style Sheets. HTML is used to create web page structure and text while CSS is used to style the structure and text visually. HTML can be used to create objects like sections, menus, and functions within a webpage. CSS is used to select those objects and style them with fonts, colors, layout, and more to make the webpage visually appealing.
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Illustrator
Illustrator is a computer program for design developed by Adobe. Illustrator is used by designers to create and edit vector graphics. It can be used for print, web, applications, videos, animations, and more.