Day in the life of
Web Designer – Hector Harris-Burton
A typical day for me would involve working on the designs for our current clients. Due to the fact that we have a steady flow of web design clients, I’m lucky enough to be designing a lot of the time. So, most of my job does revolve around designing websites for our clients.
However, part of my job is staying up to date with the latest in design trends, finding inspiration for our designs, and looking at what’s possible from a development perspective. This means that when I’m not designing, I’m researching the industry, competitors, and often just the websites that I like the look of so that I can use them as inspiration. These are both ongoing processes and so while I might not be doing research every day, it does happen quite a lot. But if I’m asked to help out on a piece of content by our marketing team, I’ll schedule some work with them and figure out exactly what we need to do. This often comes in the form of visual content pieces like infographics or designing an interactive piece of content.
Pros
I do love this job; I think that my favorite part is being able to watch a brand that we’ve built grow from nothing to something amazing. I’m able to say that I had a band in creating some larger brands and helping them grow. It’s a really rewarding part of the job. I also love that there is always something to do; you get very little time to sit and do nothing because you can always be learning and testing new ideas, or you’ll have work to be getting on with.
Cons
I would say that one of the cons is that you will have to be able to multitask on a very high level. You’re likely to be working on a number of projects at once and so you’ll be to be organized and stay on top of a lot of work all at one time. Many creative people aren’t great at this and so it can be a conflicting part of the job.
What’s more client rejection be brutal, it doesn’t always happen, but you’ll get a client that is really difficult to work with. They’ll give you little to no guidance and then, once you create a design for them, they might not like it, or they’ll pick it apart because it’s not what they had in mind. This is fine because it’s part of the job and at the end of the day, they’re paying for the designs, however, it can be hard not to take it personally sometimes. You need to be able to separate your personal attachment from the design.
