Hiring a new designer isn't always easy. No matter how specific I make the requirements in a job advertisement I still receive countless CVs from people who have several years LAMP development experience but none in front end design. What's that all about?
Anyway, this article is intended to shed some light on what it's like to be at the other end of the table, scrutinising your every response and hopefully consider you for a web designer position on my team.
Obligatory disclaimer: The views expressed here are not necessarily that of every Senior Designer in charge of assembling a team.
Now before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let me start by listing some crucial requirements for any self respecting web designer living in this century. If your CV contains the following attributes then you're already passed the first stage of getting my attention.
Obvious design skill
Templates you downloaded and re-badged do not count (we've all seen this happen). Your designs need to be 100% your own original work, and need to show obvious care has been taken towards layout and style without compromising usability.
Coding capability
This surprisingly comes as a shock to some web designers. You need to be comfortable hand coding XHTML and CSS. If you're still relying on a WYSWYG editor for layout, then you're indicating that you're not comfortable with the code. I think too much emphasis is placed on designers having Dreamweaver experience. In fact there are some designers who haven't even touched it. But anyone who chooses a text editor over WSYWYG will impress more.
Cross browser support
While I'm testing your sites in Firefox in the first instance, I will also follow up with all 3 latest versions of Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera and Chrome. As much as we loathe IE and would like to see it die a much deserved painful death, we still have to cater for it.
Semantic mark-up
Most designers miss this and some that I've interviewed aren't even sure what it is. If you're using class="large_text" instead of <h1></h1> or separating paragraphs of text double <br />, you're doing it wrong. Semantics exist for a reason, but that's a topic for another article.
Familiarity with at least one JavaScript framework
JQuery, Mootools, Scriptalicious - what ever blows your hair back. Familiarity with at least one should be a standard part of any designers arsenal.
Accomplish as much as possible with CSS
If you're still using dreadful MM JavaScript to create roll-overs in the navigation that could have been accomplished with a few lines of CSS, then have a read of this article.
Design your CV
Some will argue this isn't so important and that might be true. But if your claiming to put the 'awe' into 'awesome' and I'm reading those words in an unformatted text document, well it just doesn't add up. Remember this is your first point of contact with me, so make an impression. CV's like the 2 shown in screenshots below (displayed with permission) make an awesome first impression.
Getting down to business
The truth is, once the best CV's have been separated and I've interviewed each respective candidate (some twice) I'm left with a group of potential employees who are very closely matched with one another. So how can I decide among all these awesome candidates? A lot of it comes down to simply how you carry yourself during the interview.
Speak with confidence. Make me a believer in you and your web philosophies. I want you to take control of the interview and have me on the back foot by putting questions to me. You don't have to tip-toe. Ask me about the organisation and question if we're up to the standard that you would want to be associated with. Don't just assume that because you're on top of your game that we are as well. Putting that question out there says to me that you're not just gunning for any job - but you really want to work with a calibre of people who share the same high standards as you.
With that, I immediately know you're going to fit in just fine.
Storm
I've seen quite a few jobs listed via Seek (Perth) in the last 6 months, and when I check out the respective websites, HTMLtidy immediately throws up it's warning. When I check the code, there are so many basic errors.... not an & in site, open tags etc etc... often with some nifty JavaScript on the same page as well, which is confusing as surely JS is harder to code than pure vanilla XHTML???
Wednesday 20th May 2009 | 03:53 PM Reply Comment URL Profile Back to top