Starting Out as a Junior Designer

Breaking into web design is exciting and yes, a little intimidating. But with the right mindset, skills and strategy, you can land your first role faster than you think.

Many beginners confuse web design with web development.

Here’s the difference:

Web Designers focus on how a website looks and feels. You’ll work with layout, colour, typography, accessibility and user experience (UX).

Web Developers handle how a website works, writing the code that powers it.

As a junior web designer, your job is to bring creativity and usability together. You might not code complex functions, but knowing the basics of HTML, CSS and responsive design will make you more valuable.

In this article we will talk all things design and the tools that help junior designers.

1. What employers look for:

Most employers look for these skills:

Design tools: Figma, Adobe XD, Sketch or Canva

Responsive design principles

UI/UX fundamentals: wireframing, prototyping, usability

Communication: Explaining design decisions clearly

Collaboration: Working with other designers, developers and clients

Time Management: Handling multiple projects

Curiosity and Creativity: Staying up to date with design trends ensures your projects are kept engaging

Tip: Build small design projects weekly. Redesign a landing page you love or create a personal project like a portfolio homepage.

2. Create a Portfolio (Even Without Clients):

Your portfolio is your calling card.
If you don’t have clients yet, make your own opportunities:

Redesign existing websites for practice

Invent mock brands and design their pages

Share your process: show sketches, reasoning and before/after visuals

Show that you understand user problems and can design solutions, that’s what employers care about most.

Include 3–5 strong projects that demonstrate a mix of creativity, usability and technical skill.

3. Keep Learning and Evolving

Web design changes fast, tools, trends and techniques evolve constantly.

Keep your skills sharp by:

Following design blogs.

Taking online courses

Experimenting with new tools and frameworks

Growth happens when you stay curious and keep creating.

4. Common Mistakes to Avoid

Copying without understanding: imitation can teach you, but always adapt and learn why designs work.

Ignoring accessibility: make designs usable for everyone and pass accessibility checks.

Overloading your portfolio: show your best, not everything.

Starting out as a junior web designer isn’t always about being perfect, it’s about being proactive.

Keep learning, designing, sharing and connecting.

5. Tools to Help you that Helped me

Designing Tool:

Figma: Figma is a great design tool as it allows you to design quickly a page’s structure and layout before worrying about colours, fonts or visuals. These are called low density wireframes. Figma also allows you, on the same Design File, to create high density wireframes which represent the final look and feel of the website, used to test usability and design accuracy before coding.

Inspiration Sites: 

‘Awwwards’ is a website and platform that celebrates and showcases exceptional web design and development. It's a site gallery for high-quality examples of web design, an award platform where sites are submitted, judged, and awarded, an educational and inspirational hub (blogs, courses, collections) and a community/industry network for designers, studios and creatives. This helps give inspiration for latest trends but also ways to lay blocks and components so you don't keep sticking to the same layout on every project.

6. More Tools for General Designing:

General Designer Resources:

FontPair allow you to pick out a suitable font for your project whilst still being accessible for everyone as it gives you heading and body text fonts that go together.

Colour Contrast Checker: is a tool that helps you test how distinguishable a foreground element (like text or icons) is from its background, in terms of brightness and colour differences. The goal is to see whether your design is accessible for people with vision impairments, low contrast sensitivity or colour blindness.

IconFinder: is a good site which allows to you pick free icons for your projects, it gives you an option on if you want to save it as a PNG or SVG to edit in your design.

Pexels: is a website which you can pick from thousands of free images to use in your projects as well, these are good as place holders until a client tells you what they want or you can use them as simple backgrounds in your designs.

Getting Started

Starting out as a junior web designer is all about building a strong foundation, learning the tools, understanding design principles and creating work that shows your potential.

Consistency, curiosity and professionalism will set you apart, helping you evolve from an aspiring designer into a valued creative professional.