There are thousands of different career options for students, but one of the most popular and fastest-growing is in web design. By mastering technical coding and design skills, students can develop their creativity by making aesthetically pleasing and functional websites.
While still in their freshman year of college, students can begin honing their graphic design skills. It would seem that studying takes up all your free time and there is no energy or opportunity left to learn anything additional. But in such cases, students come to the aid of online assistants. By studying essaysadvisor reviews you will be able to pick up a writing service that will help close some writing assignments.
Here, we’ll take a look at an overview of tools and applications for students to start learning and developing web design competence!
Basic Program
Usually, website design is done in specialized programs (unless the designer is using a website builder). Let’s take a look at the basic design applications that are popular with web designers.
Adobe family
Despite the growing popularity of more and easier to master programs, Adobe products still occupy the leading position on the market.
Adobe Photoshop is a basic application that is designed for both image processing and design in general. Since Photoshop is still the most popular product among designers, layout designers, and developers, mastering this tool is important for a full-fledged project.
Among the disadvantages of the program are the following:
- Difficult to master. Photoshop has a complex interface with special tools, so the designer needs to spend a large amount of time on training.
- It is not intended for designing interfaces directly. Despite the versatility of the program, many functions for creating designs are quite time-consuming, unlike more modern counterparts.
- The program is paid. Designers will have to pay the developers of the application once a year.
Adobe Experience Design (Adobe XD) – a relatively new program line of Adobe, created for interface design. The application supports vector graphics and layout. It is possible to work with grids, standard blocks, and typography.
In addition to Adobe Photoshop and Adobe XD, the company has several other products that website developers use:
- Adobe Illustrator – a program for creating vector images, such as logos, illustrations, and so on.
- Adobe After Effects – an application for creating animations. Mostly used to demonstrate designs or develop animated elements.
- Adobe InDesign – an application that is used for both print layout and web pages.
Adobe products are popular tools for web designers and are used by developers all over the world. Despite the rather large cost of the program and the complexity of the interface, designers successfully use the application and create designs for websites of varying complexity.
Sketch
Sketch is a relatively new graphic editor that is pushing Photoshop out of the web design market. Since Sketch was developed for designing interfaces, it is also quite popular with web designers. With the help of the program, you can create a layout of a modern website, without resorting to complex image processing.
Basically, Sketch is intended for creating block structure websites. You can create blocks, buttons, forms, and other things with a single movement of the mouse. There are opportunities for in-depth work with typography, modular grids. The main drawback of the program is limited OS compatibility. Sketch is designed specifically for Mac OS and has no equivalent for Windows.
Figma
Another program on the market that is the main competitor of Sketch. This application works on both Windows and Mac OS, so it quickly became popular among web designers. One of the main advantages of the program is the ability to work through the browser and save the results of their work in the cloud.
Another application of Figma is interface creation. The program has the ability to customize modular grids, create simple and complex elements, work with fonts, and more.
Tips to consider when choosing an appropriate tool
These are the three main programs that designers use when creating layouts. When choosing an application to work with, you need to consider the following nuances:
- The specifics of the design. In general, modern sites have a block structure, which is more convenient to implement with simple elements. In this case, Sketch and Figma are suitable for most designers. Yet, if the layout includes complex image processing, you can’t do without Photoshop.
- Technical capabilities of the developers. Often, layout designers work with .psd format and do not use other programs except for the Adobe line. In this case, designers have to adjust to other professionals and choose the right tool, based on the capabilities of developers.
- Usability. The complexity of the interface is one of the peculiarities of working with the Adobe product line. Since the tools are not designed directly for developing interfaces, designers have difficulty creating layouts, unlike specialized programs like Sketch or Figma.
We should also mention website builders. Some developers do not want to spend a lot of time and effort on creating unique resources. They resort to special builders, which allow you to make a website based on an existing template. Such applications are popular among small companies that have no budget and no established brand.