Learn how to prepare for web designer job interviews and understand what hiring managers are looking for. Discover how to answer common interview questions and effectively showcase your skills and design style.
Key Insights
- Entry-level design interviews usually involve question and answer sessions with hiring managers. They aim to understand your skills, style, and career goals.
- Hiring managers typically ask about your design style and process. They want to know if your creative sensibilities align with their organization.
- Another common question focuses on your strengths and weaknesses in design. This helps hiring managers to understand your comfort level with different aspects of the design process.
- Hiring managers often ask how you respond to feedback and revise your work. They want to know if you can adapt to the pace of revisions and feedback in their work environment.
- Providing a step-by-step description of your revision process or presenting a case study of a challenging project that required significant revisions can support your answers.
- Guiding your interviewer by incorporating anecdotes about your work, discussing interesting design choices, and highlighting projects you are proud of can enhance your interview performance.
Interview Questions for a Web Designer
One of the most intimidating parts of any job search is the interview process. This is when a hiring committee has come the closest it can to making a decision and is looking to narrow the field to its final choice. Nailing an interview can be the difference between getting the job and being part of the last round of cuts, which makes it incredibly important that you prepare for the process. While every interview is going to be different, there are a few things that you can generally anticipate at any given one.
What to Expect in a Web Designer Interview
For the most part, design interviews for entry-level positions will be a Q&A session with a hiring manager or a few members of a hiring committee. They won’t tend to last a significant amount of time, and they will be designed to help the hiring manager understand who you are and what your design skills and goals are. You may end up having to undergo multiple interviews, either to speak to multiple managers or to demonstrate your specific technical skills to team leaders who will need to oversee your work. Each interview will have a clearly defined purpose and it is very possible that you will only need a single interview to get an entry-level position.
Top Interview Questions for Web Designers
While every interview is going to be different, you can rest assured that there are specific genres of questions that almost all interviewers will ask. Being prepared for these questions will make the interview process significantly easier, particularly if you can anticipate the kinds of answers that hiring managers will expect to hear. It is also a useful practice to have a mock interview or two since this will help you prepare for answering common questions and answering more specific or esoteric questions. You should also prepare a few specific anecdotes or personal stories about your work that you wish to share and attempt to work those into your answers. Guiding your interviewer can be a very useful talent to master.
How would you describe your design style?
Since web design is a creative field, you’ll be expected to be able to describe both your process and your style as a designer. Interviewers want to know whether or not your design sensibilities fit in with their firm, and they will want to hear you describe your own style with deliberateness. This question may also ask you to explain your design process since that will also be a vital part of your work at the firm.
How to answer
Good answers to this question will focus on your ability to deliberately and consciously explain what it is that makes your voice as a designer unique. You will want to be able to point to specific aspects of your designs and specific designs in your portfolio that speak to your voice as a Web Designer. You’ll also want to be able to describe why you made some of the decisions you made and you’ll want to describe what aspects of the process are most important to you. If you prioritize a certain kind of visual design or if you are proud of the accessibility of your portfolio, this is where you should make that clear.
What do you consider the strongest/weakest elements of your skills?
Many design jobs will require entry-level designers to spin a lot of different plates as they work on multiple projects or assignments. Hiring managers will want to know what kinds of work you are most comfortable with and what aspects of the design process cause you the most problems. This can both serve as an extension of the previous question, and it can help hiring managers gauge whether or not you are likely to end up gravitating towards a specific kind of work while you are employed by their company. Finally, it also helps hiring managers get an honest assessment of your weaknesses as a designer.
How to answer
Most importantly, you’ll want to answer questions like this honestly. Don’t be cute, and try to avoid being frank about what you think your strengths and limitations are as a designer. If you find that your programming skills are a bit rusty or that you aren’t able to quickly redesign entire prototypes, you should say this. Similarly, don’t apologize or try to downplay your imperfections as a designer, but instead, try and frame these weaknesses as something you are looking to improve upon or that you are making efforts to address. This is also a good time to talk about how you’ve overcome design hurdles in the past.
You should also be willing to use questions like this to discuss interesting design choices you’ve made or projects you hope to be able to work on. This is a good place to start directing your interviewer to the kinds of questions you’d hope they’d ask by piquing their curiosity with some interesting design work you are proud of.
How do you go about responding to feedback and revising your work?
One significant challenge for new designers is often the process of receiving feedback and iterating on a design. While most designers will receive feedback over the course of their training, responding to feedback in a classroom is a different process from responding to feedback in a work environment, as there is a much more coherent idea of what a finished product should look like on the job. This means that many designers may struggle early on with iterating upon a design to meet a client or department’s needs, and the hiring manager will want to know whether or not this is going to be a concern going forward. This question largely isn’t intended to determine whether or not you can respond to feedback but to gauge the process you use and whether or not you can respond to feedback at the pace that the firm may need it addressed.
How to answer
There are two ways to answer this question. If you do have a specific process that you undertake for revising work, you should explain that process step-by-step. This will demonstrate that you have a system in place to respond to feedback, and this will allow the hiring manager to determine whether or not this system is a good fit for their studio. In addition, this answer will allow you to demonstrate to the hiring manager that you take a systemic approach to the design process, which may be a selling point in some cases.
If you don’t take a systemic approach to the revision and iteration process, you may wish to use this time to provide a case study of a difficult or challenging project you were working on that required substantial revision. This is both a good way to direct hiring managers to aspects of your portfolio that you want them to focus upon, and it is a good way to suggest that those designs have undergone deliberate changes and revision processes in order to reach the state they are currently in. This is valuable for prospective designers looking to highlight the time and energy they put into their work.