Best institution to learn web design in London

Hi, I'm very keen on becoming a web designer and would appreciate any recommendations of good institutions that would offer crash courses to become a web designer. I would like to learn from the best . Any advice on what field or language to select will also be appreciated.

Best institution to learn webdesign in the whole wide world: The internet.

There are a million websites and free tutorials to teach you everything you need to know from the 'real world' of webdesign. No course is going to teach you what you really need to know. And there's hundreds of forum like this (none like ours because we're the best) where professionals are willing to give you their time to help you along the way.

I personally recommend HTML Dog, but I'm sure our members will have a few more suggestions....

Search Google but put in tutorials in your search there are some useless ones out there so pick wisely

There are no good institutions at which to learn Web Design in the UK. At the minute the education sytem isn't keeping up with the changing trends but this is a common criticism of formal education. The tutors and lecturers have so much other work to do that a lot of them struggle to stay current. I'd say do a graphic design course, they are of a better standard and at the best places the lecturers are still active withing the industry. You'll be hard pushed to find a design institution in the world that is better than St Martins in London. Some of the work that comes out of there is amazing though you will need to put together a decent portfolio of varied stuff to get a sniff. Competition is high at all London design schools.

There are quite a few professional development courses led by private companies too. They tend to be extremely expensive, however, and demand some prior knowledge.

Good luck,

Pete.

Self taught vs formal education...you have to decide for yourself. How well do you learn....Structure or at your own pace. Ultimately, it is up to you. Personally, however, alot of web designers are self taught....

Agree hole heartedly with the above comment. I deal with a few designers in the UK and US and only 2 of them had degrees. The main thing they complain about is the fact that their courses focused to deeply on some subjects and completely side swiped others, where as the self taught, admittedly took longer but had a wider spectrum. Again it depends on the individual but but when you do courses your time is spent doing what they want from you rather expanding to cover other aspects.
The education scene in the UK for design works is quite historic now and most of the moderators do it on the side. It is slowly catching up but not quite their yet.

I'm at Uni doing a degree in Computer Science just to say I can get a degree. Nothing of what I'm being taught even begins to cut it in the real world.

If you've taken part in any type of computer-related education you will know that the successful people are the ones that go off on their own and teach themselves.

That's why I finally got around to getting my masters in computer info systems. It was weird when I started the courses and realized I already knew most of the stuff I was being taught. All the degress did for me was improve my salary some in the corporation I worked for. Big woopee.

Yeah I am working on getting a degree right now as well. I hate it, I know pretty much everything they are teaching. In fact I had the teacher telling me that dreamwever put out the same code you would if you were hand coding a site. He said there was no difference...how ignorant….lol.

Ahhh, then there comes the flash class which the teacher said why the heck am I teaching this class? Instead for his class I wrote tutorials and articles for the class to learn from. Anyway I think a degree is important if you are planning on working for someone else. Other then that, the only reason you need one is if you want to impress your clients, which normally they only care about you portfolio.

Good for us if that's the level of competition Universities are generating... LOL

I agree Vanessa, that a University course "should" give you the skills you need to build a career in web development, but that's not the case.

From my experience, university leavers are used to being spoon fed information and don't know how to develop their own skills of their own accord. A bit like a house pet and a wild animal. They can't hunt!

Everyone agrees that this field changes every 5 minutes (almost). The most important skill in IT today isn't knowing how to do stuff, it's knowing how to teach yourself new skills and adapt to new technologies/standards.

I'm certainly in no position to argue the case for web courses in general because I'm too new to it to really know what I'm talking about. From a personal point of view though, I do feel the OU course I did was very good, and so far I haven't discovered that anything they taught us was inaccurate, or not up to date (but I did only finish the course three and a half weeks ago, so I guess it's early days!). But they definitely encouraged us to think for ourselves and work things out for ourselves, and I didn't feel spoon-fed.

I agree with what you say at the end there, and if universities aren't teaching people how to learn things for themselves, then they are failing miserably in one of their core functions (not the university I work for you understand, we of course get everything completely right )

Hmmmm, let's see were you using a WYSIWYG, or were you hand coding the site? Were you using TABLES? Most colleges are still teaching tables for building your website. The problem is around here anyway, people take a dreamwever class and think they know how to build a good website.

The course was more focused on the other aspects of building a site, rather than the mechanics of the actual building if that makes sense - i.e. accessibility, useability, navigation, site structure, maintenance, standards, how to interpret what a client actually wants/needs, a bit of SEO, the importance of good content etc. For our final assignment we had to design a website based on a brief from a fictitious client, and we were expected to hand code that in XHTML with CSS and we would lose marks if it didn't validate. They pointed us in the right direction for learning hand coding, but we were expected to already know how to hand code, or learn it ourselves alongside the course (which is what I did).

In terms of tables, they gave us an overview of them simply because, as they pointed out, a lot of sites out there still use tables, so we should at least understand how they work, if only so that we understand how to un-table any already tabled sites! They stressed that we shouldn't use tables on any new sites we create.

Does that answer your questions? Sorry if I'm coming across as defensive, I don't mean to be, I just really do believe the course I did was a good one!

I hope I did not come across wrong. It is not that tables are bad, it is just that tables are not supposed to be used to structure a website with, and they never were meant to accomplish that. Tables are supposed to be used for tabular data!

Sounds like a GREAT course! It is a shame that all schools don't live up to that classes standards.

That's quite good actually. Where did you study. I have some friends doing things like interactive media and even one or two web design courses and they don't teach any of that. And some of these are at massive universities in Manchester, Liverpool and London. If the big guns can't get it right then something is going wrong but they teach with dreamweaver and when they hand code you old methods - tables and the like.

I know the situation is improving as your experience has show but I'd still like to see universities actually teaching xhtml and css and also getting visiting experts in to lecture. That could do students a world of good but little by little it does improve, the only problem is that it's always going to be one step behind the industry but that is true of all courses.

Pete.

No, you didn't come across wrong Jacob, I understand the issues with tables

Pete - the course was with the Open University, this course:

http://www3.open.ac.uk/courses/bin/p12.dll?C01TT280

They did teach us some of the actual specifics of xhtml/css coding, but the bulk of that we had to learn ourselves, but with the help of the other students and tutors on the course forum.

Vanessa your course sounds much better than most. Good for you!
We've had many many students posts their sites in our critique forum this past winter. That was part of their course. Post and see what we thought. Those sites were not good in so many ways that it made us wonder what if anything those students were being taught.

My local Technical college is still giving Dreamweaver specific courses using the WYSWYG / tables as their curriculum.

I guess it boils down to being an educated consumer. If you want to study from a university, at least choose one teaching latest. Teach the language of hand coding rather than teaching how to use a specific software program. Otherwise you are almost better off learning it yourself.

Some of those student sites (the ones that posted in the critique forum) were amongst the worst I've ever seen actually, yet some work by graphic design students is amongst the best I've ever seen. Why the disparity? It must have something to do with the way they were taught as if they are stifling the people who have the freshest and most innovative of ideas. That is one of the benefits of youth: experimentation and the tenacity to try things that others won't. Univerities and colleges shouldn't stifle that and if they do they are not only not doing their job but they're actually being destructive.

That course looks good, Vanessa, I'm familiar with the OU but I didn't know about that course. I was gonna do an engineering course or something with them a few years back, instead I decided I didn't want to earn a living and went for performing arts. Why oh why oh why? A glutton for punishment, I am.

Anyway.

Pete.