Where it started

The course covered a fairly broad mix of web design fundamentals. There was the visual side, layout, typography, colour and imagery, alongside the more practical side of understanding HTML, CSS, page structure and navigation.

What I enjoyed was that those things weren’t really separated from each other. If you were designing a page, you also needed to understand how that page was going to work. If you wanted something to look a particular way, you needed at least some understanding of what was required to build it.

It meant I started learning design and implementation at roughly the same time.

I was never trying to become a developer, but having that technical grounding turned out to be incredibly useful. It removed some of the mystery around what happened after a design was finished. I could understand the basic structure behind a website and, importantly, I could make things myself.

There was something quite addictive about that. You could start with an empty page, write some code, add the styling and eventually open a browser and see something you had created sitting there in front of you.

Of course, it rarely worked perfectly the first time.

I spent plenty of time trying to understand why a layout had suddenly broken, why something was appearing in completely the wrong place or why changing one seemingly insignificant thing had somehow affected half the page. At the time it was mostly frustrating. Looking back, that process of making something, seeing where it failed and working out how to improve it was probably one of the most useful things I was learning.

The course was also where I began learning the basic principles that sit underneath digital design.

At first, it’s easy to think about design largely in terms of how something looks. You’re choosing colours, arranging elements on a page, working with typography and trying to make something visually interesting.

As I learned more, I started to understand that those decisions had a job to do.

Typography helped people understand what was important. Layout gave information structure. Colour could create hierarchy and draw attention to something. Navigation needed to help somebody understand where they were and where they could go next.

A website could look good and still be difficult to use.

That sounds incredibly obvious to me now, but it was an important distinction when I was starting out. It was probably my earliest introduction to the idea that design wasn’t simply about making something attractive; it was about making something understandable and usable as well.

I wouldn’t have called that user experience design at the time. It was simply part of learning how to make a good website.

One of the things I remember most about learning web design was how practical it felt. There was only so much you could understand by reading about it. Eventually you had to make something.

That suited me.

I’ve always learned much better by doing something, getting it wrong and figuring out why than by only studying the theory behind it. Web design gave me an almost endless opportunity to do that because there was always something else I could try.

I could change a layout, experiment with a different treatment, rewrite a piece of code or build another page and immediately see what happened. Sometimes it worked. Quite often it didn’t. Either way, I was learning.

It also meant that the diploma wasn’t really the end of the education. If anything, it gave me enough knowledge to start teaching myself properly.

Once I understood the basics, I could experiment outside of the coursework, look at websites I liked and try to understand how they had been made. I could start creating my own work and gradually build confidence through actually doing it.

That became a pattern throughout the early part of my career. Learn enough to try something, make it, realise how much I still didn’t know, learn some more and try again.

This is probably the most important part of the story for me.

Before doing the diploma, web design was something I was interested in. By the end of it, it felt like something I could genuinely pursue.

I didn’t finish the course suddenly feeling like a fully formed designer. I was nowhere near that. What I had was a basic understanding of the craft, enough technical knowledge to make things myself and, most importantly, the confidence to keep going.

From there, the progression happened fairly naturally.

I continued designing websites and improving the visual side of my work, but I became increasingly interested in why some things worked better than others. I started thinking more about how people moved through a site, how information was organised and what somebody was actually trying to achieve when they arrived.

Over time, those questions became a much bigger part of my work.

Web design gradually became digital design. Digital design became increasingly focused on usability and customer experience. The websites became larger products and services, and the problems became more complicated.

Eventually my role moved from designing individual experiences to thinking about the systems around them and, later, leading other designers doing that work.

None of that was mapped out when I enrolled on the diploma. One thing just led to the next.

A lot of what I learned technically during the diploma belongs to a very different era of the web. The tools have changed, technology has moved on and the way we design and build digital products today would have been difficult to imagine when I was starting out.

That doesn’t make the early learning irrelevant.

If anything, it makes it easier to see which parts actually mattered.

Understanding the medium you’re designing for mattered. Learning how to structure information mattered. Understanding hierarchy mattered. Thinking about how somebody would move through something rather than only how it looked mattered. Having enough technical knowledge to have a sensible conversation with the person building your design mattered.

Those things still matter to me now.

So does the habit of making things.

My work today is obviously very different. I spend much more time thinking about customers, products, strategy, teams and the wider business than I do writing HTML and CSS. But I still like getting close to the work, understanding how things are made and seeing an idea gradually turn into something real.

When I think about everything that came afterwards, the ICS Diploma feels quite small on paper. It was an introductory web design qualification at the very beginning of my career.

For me, though, it was much more important than that.

It gave me somewhere to start.

And from there, I just kept going.}