Her undergraduate and freelance graphic design (posters, book jackets logos etc) have been brilliant. She has a great design sense.

She wants to move home, fine with her mom and I, and learn to design for the web. Not write HTML, but design websites that look better than the @#$%& out there.

She grew up seeing how a screenprint/graphics studio works, ahe's rock solid...but how does she turn that skill into a sellable product?

Online community college stuff, some sort of tutorial in Dreamweaver or whatever?

She wants to live back here at the beach, the money and life crunch in DC for 6 years has shown her that's she's a beach girl after all. My suggestion regarding design is that it will soon be on the web (whatever device) and that a good designer designing good sites should be a solid place to be.

Who knows, but I'd like to hear from our august group, what say ye?

use something like lynda.com to learn techniques and programs like Dreamweaver. But, as is often the case, learn by doing is how many folks learn most quickly. There are a lot of areas that she could specialize in, but it would be helpful to first get a general, broad knowledge, even if she's not real keen on HTML. Learning how CMS's are put together is a great place to start...give her an assignment to develop a new website for some local organization. Have her do everything from start to finish. She will learn more doing that than anything else.

Agree with clay; but from the parenting perspective, get her to pay rent. It's important for adult children to learn to be independent and out on their own, even if they want to save money by living at home.

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Freya says, 'Hello from NOLA, baby!' (Laissez bon temps rouler!)

She can certainly take a Dreamweaver course, but she also needs to learn HTML and CSS, if she's serious about doing this kind of work. Any particular reason why she doesn't want to?

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PeterB
Agree with clay; but from the parenting perspective, get her to pay rent. It's important for adult children to learn to be independent and out on their own, even if they want to save money by living at home.

This, even if you don't want to charge her rent. If you don't, take the rent and put it in an account and set it aside in case she needs money in the future, or for a down payment.

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C(-)ris
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I was asking the web master at my old job about this very thing and he said that learning HTML is a must if one intends to pursue web design professionally. It's not just the "look" of a site that can be @#$%&.

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I would recommend not learning Dreamweaver, but HTML, CSS, javascript (and then a popular library), and PHP - in that order.

tech skills and business sense are what separates well paid designers and those barely getting by. the tech industry is doing quite well and seems poised to continue. there is lots of demand for people that can design AND understand the structure of an app.

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<< HTML, CSS, javascript (and then a popular library), and PHP>>

Is there an on-line course in this?

I found this, that might be a good jumping off point.

[www.html.net]

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Roswell, GA (Atlanta suburb)

Some good advice so far.

Whether it's for paper or pixels, the biggest (and maybe most common) mistake a designer can make is only learning how to make it 'pretty' without knowing how to make it work as well.

A designer who makes designs that look great on screen but can't be printed on paper (or costs a king's ransom to put on paper) or designs sites that dazzle the eye but are a pain to navigate or load like molasses is not much more use than an architect who designs buildings that collapse in the first stiff breeze.

Be warned, web design has not escaped drifting into the same commodity/'My nephew has a computer, he can do that for you' territory that old school design got sucked into so long ago.

Web hosting companies are offering 'free' or cut rate web sites, printing trade groups are mentoring printers to offer web services, handled by back end web design assembly line operations, as a way to shore up flagging sales of dead tree printing.

Once again the professional with the deepest toolbox will be the best suited to survive and to thrive.

Some good advice thus far. I would suggest her figuring out where she wants to be in 5 or 10 years. If in four years she wants to be making six figures, then she'll need to learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript too. If she'd be fine pumping out low-end stuff making ~$30-40k/yr (depending on the area), she might be able to get away with design and something like Dreamweaver.

BB makes a good point about web design being a commodity. If she doesn't learn to code, or if she learns something like Dreamweaver, or if she only has basic knowledge of CMS's, she's going to be competing in the commodity world. Somewhat fortunately, the value of the USD has dropped so much in the past few years that outsourcing that stuff isn't as cheap as it once was - rather than being $2/hr it's now $6 or $7.

The days of just being a designer are pretty much gone. Unless you've got a lot of experience or are strictly a "UX" person, there's not a lot of job opportunities for designers that don't code.

Being able to turn that into a business... I'd strongly suggest her getting the skills people pay well for first, then try to turn it into a business.

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besides learning the languages of LAMP, she should specialize in one or more open source CMS's, and focus on responsive layouts that resize to the device. mobile is king. she should be onborad with that. i would suggest looking at the omega framework for drupal.

dot.

Based on my own experience, learning to write HTML and CSS is a huge help. You get a much better handle on the big differences between designing for print and designing pages for web. The tendency, coming from print, is to want to be precise about the wrong things. You may be more able to appreciate and make use of the fluidity that is possible when setting up pages for the web if you learn the code that makes it possible. You will also be more able to fix things if you can understand the source code.

If I were doing this for a living, I'd want to know javascript and PHP as well.

You don't have to have everything memorized, as long as you have good reference materials handy, at least to begin with.

Check out simplebits.com.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/16/2013 10:19AM by ka jowct.

This is great advice, all. Thank you.

She'll be paying rent, no worries there.

Good advice on her becoming the "complete" package...she's pretty too and that always helps to sell something! Ha!

Keep it coming I'm all ears....she got her beauty from my wife not me!

[simplebits.com]

I like Dan Cederholm's books. I have found it very helpful to work through the examples, make modifications, tinker, etc. I've been visiting his site off and on since 2004 or 2005, and it has had several major make-overs. Every iteration has been done well. Code skills AND design skills.

I have also found this guy's CSS books very helpful: [www.stylinwithcss.com]. I started learning CSS with the first edition of <i>Stylin' with CSS</i>. I just got the third edition, which covers CSS3 and HTML5.

I wish I had the time to learn PHP and Javascript.

This is a nice time to get into web design, IMHO, not necessarily in terms of the work climate, but certainly in terms of what you can do now or expect to do in the not too distant future, just within your stylesheet. And IE has gotten more compliant in the last version.

A WYSIWYG editor is fine, as long as it allows you to work directly with the source code, and as long as you can work in the code view comfortably. If it speeds up some of the nit-picky stuff, and provides good site management capabilities, it can be a significant time-saver.

I still use my old version of GoLive for that reason. I figure out styles and layouts in TextWrangler or Espresso and then bring that into GoLive.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/16/2013 01:27PM by ka jowct.