If you love visual design and the experience of navigating through a Website, you may want to know how to become an interface designer. People who build user interfaces for Web and mobile applications are sometimes called template authors, Web developers or Web designers, and you can find work in this field by getting a degree in Web development. Compared to Web programming, designing interfaces is relatively easy and doesn’t require a lot of programming knowledge. It’s not even necessary to have a degree to start working in this field, although you probably shouldn’t expect to earn a full-time income until you have a degree and get hired by a company, because the freelance market for this work is quite crowded.
Becoming a User Interface Designer
UIs are written in a wide range of template languages, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, GTK+, Django, Java, Ruby and others, so the first step to finding work in this field is choosing a platform. Of course, you probably already know that HTML, CSS and JavaScript are the theming languages of the Web, but certain Web frameworks have their own template languages as well, such as the Django template language for building Django UIs. You can get started working with just HTML, CSS and JavaScript, though, and as you progress, you can add new languages to your repertoire.
To write UIs for mobile devices, you need to know more about programming and the software design pattern called model-view-controller, or MVC. For example, Android devices use the Android framework, which is based on Java, and iOS devices use the Cocoa Touch framework, which is based on Objective C, according to Apple. These frameworks have large selections of UI widgets that you can piece together into applications. Of course, you can always design your own widgets from scratch, but this approach isn’t always necessary. There are also cross-platform frameworks for designing Android and iOS UIs simultaneously. For example, the PhoneGap framework uses JavaScript to make cross-platform, Web-based UIs for iOS and Android.
Starting a Career in Application Design
This knowledge will help you design user interfaces, but to start a career in Web or mobile application design, you’ll need a few more skills. If you’re mainly interested in visual design, you can enroll in a two-year design program at an art school or community college and work as more of a designer than a developer.
If you prefer coding to visual design, you should at least get a two-year degree from a community college or four-year university where you can take elective computer science courses. A four-year computer science degree might be overkill if you only want to build Websites and mobile apps. The most important step is to get good at the languages in which you want to program.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Web developers earn a median annual salary of $62,500 and can expect 20 percent job growth over the next ten years. These figures are better than average for other occupations in the U.S. economy and should be encouraging to aspiring Web designers.
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There are relatively few hurdles on the path to becoming a UI designer, but the reality is that you will need a more complete set of skills to find steady work. If you think you would like to learn more about color theory, art direction, user experience design and programming, take the next step to become an interface designer.
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