To become an employable web designer: realistic goal?

You can definitely learn design on your own without attending an expensive art school. Treehouse is excellent to help you get started. I think you should focus on design principles, typography, usability and UX design. Don't get caught up in the tools like photoshop and sketch. It's the design thinking that will help you stand out in a sea of designers. Learn to think conceptually and don't use design to simply "decorate". You should be able to justify every design decision from why you chose a font to why you used a specific color palette. Keep your designs and interfaces simple. White space is your friend.

Take a look at the work from these design firms: http://focuslabllc.com/<br> http://www.pentagram.com/ http://www.duffy.com/

For more detailed design lessons, check out https://hackdesign.org/

Best of luck!

I used to be in the same boat as you. I love the coding aspect, and my art/design background was (and sort of still is) a joke. Seeing people throw together awesome designs/artwork while I hold up a little paper with stick people drawn on it...yeah...a huge hill.

The thing is though, once you start playing around with designing, and creating templates, and using CSS to make some awesome effects, you learn that the hill isn't a hill, but instead a little bump in the road. Step away from the coding aspect, find bits of "ugly HTML" out there on the web and redesign it in a way that you think would make it look better. (Don't publish it back to the web of course, at least not without permission).

Another option is to partner up with someone who has solid web design practices and combine your knowledge. Nothing wrong with a solid partnership!

Anyways, good luck and don't be afraid to try new things, dive in and see what you can do.

I think this depends on where you look for a position. Most bigger companies have two roles, designer versus front end developer. A front end developer takes a PSD file and codes it into a template. I know lots of these types that couldn't design a brand new site, but are so good at CSS and HTML that they can do pretty much anything. Most companies separate the two positions and so you'd want to look at the type of positions that don't ask if you know Adobe products but rather positions that look for HTML, CSS, and probably some JavaScript of some sort. Those are true front end developers.

To be honest, there are plenty more designers than there are developers out there. Whenever we would hire for the type of position I'm suggesting above, we would not have very many options, but whenever we hired for a designer, we had tons of options. If you become good with actual front end developing, you should be employable.