3by9

There Are 100 Million Web Designers

I’m a veteran in the web design industry, which is ridiculous to say at my ripe old age of 25 (just turned 2 weeks ago) except that it’s true.

I started blogging in July 2003, back when only a few companies used CSS and people like Jeffrey Zeldman were on the frontlines of the standards brigade. I remember the days when putting together a navigation element on a page didn’t automatically mean use an unordered list, which people didn’t really use until Fall/Winter of 2002 which was when the previously-linked A List Apart article was penned. I remember when CSS Zen Garden went live in May 2003 and how excited everyone was to put together a theme (I never did, but I sure did start-and-stop a half dozen). I remember the days when Doug Bowman was the design blog king, before he took his hiatus and returned only to go to Google. I was around when Dan Cederholm redesigned FastCompany’s website (their current design looks like ass, Dan’s was far superior and also 5 years older…) which put him on the path to design stardom. I distinctly remember how popular Movable Type was and how it dominated the blog world before WordPress made a run on them.

Do you remember any of these events?

The reason I’m taking a trip down memory lane is because I’ve been thinking recently just how many web designers there are now and how much the industry has grown in the past 3-5 years. When we launched Business Logs in early Summer 2004 the concept of a design firm that focused on blogs was unheard of. There were some other blog consulting sites out there, but none that really provided high-fidelity visual design. We were the first. Now I probably have 2 dozen blog design firms in my bookmarks folder alone, and could easily name another dozen individual designers who have put together some amazing blog-based website designs. In 2004, the playing field was so small that everything was new….

….but now in 2008, you hardly see anything completely brand new in the web design industry. My partner Paul Scrivens started the very first web design gallery at CSS Vault and now there are probably over 100. Every month I probably come across a half-dozen portfolio sites that I’d consider some of the best design sites I’ve ever seen, and this happens every month! The abundance of design talent in the world right now is unbelievable, but I see the following as some consequences of this abundance:

1. It’s unbelievably hard to go from 0-60mph as a new designer just starting out. When I started I put together a blog and some great articles and I was well on my way. Now if you don’t have a blog and you don’t have a couple unbelievable articles (with equally unbelievable pageviews and linkbacks) then you’re already behind everyone else.
2. Your portfolio has to be unreal to even get noticed. I can name a half-dozen designers right now that launched their careers with a homely portfolio but still took-off in the industry. Over time they honed their skills and are now putting out fantastic work, but when they started they were still in the learning stages so to speak. If you’re a new designer about to embark in the web design industry and you launch with a decent-but-not-amazing portfolio or blog, you’re already 5 steps behind.
3. Competition for client work drives pricing down across the industry. When I designed blogs for medium-to-large sized clients in my past life, prices started at a couple thousand dollars and worked their way up. Now that there are thousands (tens of thousands?) of free WordPress themes available — and everybody uses WP now instead of Movable Type, sorry Anil — clients see that as the bargain basement and when looking for a “custom theme” (I fucking hate that term, it should die) designers have to prove their worth beyond a shadow of a doubt because at all stages of the process a client could pick a freebie design and tweak it up. I’ve been part of many threads in Notes where people ask for bids on a nice blog design and people start throwing out 3-digit quotes. Well, shit, good luck with that.

So what do you do?

You separate yourself from the pack.

Put together a nice portfolio and blog, but don’t get caught up with the one-upsmanship that all the CSS galleries perpetuate. Read more than you write (I suggest this entry to start) and absorb more than you spew out. Twitter and all the microblogging platforms give you the means to produce verbal meta-diarrhea at all times of the day but resist the urge. Pick a niche and put together a small web-based “product” that targets that niche… it doesn’t have to be anything fancy. It could be as simple as a small utility that does to-do tracking in a new way, or a nice iPhone Summerboard theme, but design the hell out of it and then blog about it. Put it in your portfolio, and then tuck it away and put together the next little product site. The successful designers I see out there now are the ones that experiment with these little types of sites, and building a site like this teaches you a lot more than you think it will.

There aren’t really 100 million web designers out there right now, but there are enough so that you’ll get drowned out unless you pick reachable goals and then execute the hell out of ‘em. Don’t try to be the next Smashing Magazine or Freelance Switch, carve out your own area and own it.