I’ve been doing web design related stuff on and off for about a year now and I find myself get­ting increas­ingly sucked in by the nature of it. Nowa­days basi­cally not one day goes by with­out me touch­ing some­thing in pho­to­shop, read­ing a bunch of RSS or even slap on some code to the world wide web. I read an arti­cle a few days back writ­ten by Andrew Houle about the five rea­sons to why he loves being a web designer. This got me think­ing about my own rea­sons for my rel­a­tively new crush for this pro­fes­sion. Some of them are sim­i­lar to the ones he’s talk­ing about (I mean, they’re kind of gen­eral ben­e­fits) and some I’ve come to real­ize myself.

The imme­di­ate vision

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I find myself talk­ing to a poten­tial client, or maybe just a friend, about a sub­ject and I almost imme­di­ately have an epiphany about how that site would look like. This is some­thing fairly pecu­liar because the more intensely I try to vision it and add detail the more of it drifts from my mind and other ele­ments pop up instead. This process that occurs is to me fas­ci­nat­ing and I only have one word for you, sketch­book! I have to admit up until recently I’ve not been a fre­quent user of the paper way of things but I’ve come around and rec­om­mend it!

the help­ful­ness of others

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Say what you want but I’ve never expe­ri­enced the web designer com­mu­nity as any­thing else than help­ful and kind. Of course we all are a bit dam­aged and maybe not entirely sane but we’re always there to help each other with con­struc­tive crit­i­cism and idéas on how to improve ourselves.

The con­stant changes

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Every­thing is evolv­ing. The soft­ware gets improved, new tech­niques are invented, the web stan­dard is con­stantly improv­ing. To be a web designer is truly to never stop learn­ing. As soon as you stop mak­ing progress or stop read­ing up on the lat­est trends you’re out. This is one of the main rea­sons to why I love it because I am never fin­ished! There’s always some­thing new to dis­cover and this keeps me alert.

The struc­ture of the code

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To look at a sites code (or my own for that mat­ter) and find the struc­ture of the code pleas­ing. When you see the logic behind a nice piece of code it become so easy to under­stand in com­par­i­son to a messy one. So just to know that I don’t only have to cre­ate the web­site, make it func­tional and look good I also have to (or atleast should try to) make the code as sim­ple, effec­tive and log­i­cal as pos­si­ble. Another chal­lenge for the mind and another thing I love!

The domino effect

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The amount of web­sites out there is enor­mous and yet there always seem to be peo­ple in need of more. And the beauty of hav­ing a client that is sat­is­fied is that he or she will tell oth­ers about this and then sud­denly they real­ize that they’re in need of my ser­vices as well. So keep a good rela­tion­ship with the client and hope­fully they will have friends or col­leagues who will want to hire you too!

Easy access

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All I need to do my work is my com­puter, maybe a sketch block and loads of cre­ativ­ity. This means that I’m able to do my work from almost any­where with internet-access and hope­fully elec­tric­ity. This pos­si­bil­ity and free­dom is quite an won­der­ful thing which I don’t think many make much use of. But come one.. how awe­some is it to design a web­site while sit­ting out­side in the sun with an ice-cool beer!

If you have your own rea­sons, please post them and share with me!