I would say an ability to develop a UI while following a shop's preferred style guideline. I would say a mastery of CSS3+HTML is necessary, advanced JS related to DOM manipulation is also welcome.
Familiarity with CSS preprocessors would be considered big +.
If your skillset is HTML+CSS, I think you can still be more of a developer than a designer. Someone else gives you mockups and you implement them.
HTML+CSS can get you pretty far in a lot of cases without any JS required, though since HTML5, the spec includes interfaces to the Javascript APIs, as well as a whole bunch of stuff for accessibility. I enjoyed this post from a few months ago which helps give you a sense of the depth of HTML: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27080348 . This person didn't even dive into the spec, just the MDN docs.
To contrast this, a designer is someone who does things like visual branding and consistency, creating assets like logos, background images, maybe even vector graphics, and device breakpoints.
HTML and CSS are also complex enough that you can even spend a significant time specializing in one/both.
HTML/CSS is easy, any designer can pick that up in a year.
There are far more important skills that a designer should have over understanding browser quirks. Those are the questions that good designers look for in clients.
For ex. Do you have examples of sites successfully deploy that customers are interacting with on a daily basis? Do they believe in a/b testing + iterating or doing huge lengthy "expert" driven projects? What are your favourite sites designed by other people?
I've already read a few books on CSS and I definitely know my way around JavaScript, XHTML, etc. The point is that I'm no artist and I'd rather focus on what I do best: hacking. I want a person to assume the position of "artistic director" whose specific forte is web design and who will focus exclusively on UI, accessibility, and user experience.
Additionally, I wrote the above because I've been quite surprised to have not really met many folks through school or day-to-day life who are no-nonsense web designers.
If you are talking about a web designer, then I don't think it's necessary to know HTML/CSS, just good UI design, since they can create their designs in photoshop.
It's then the job of a web developer to convert that design to something a computer can display.
Sometimes people do both, and that's fine, although sometimes the people who know HTML/CSS can't design their way out of a paper bag. I'm one of them.
The skills required to design something that looks good and provides a good experience for users are orthogonal to the skills required to build well-factored, responsive HTML and CSS.
I've worked with marketing teams that tried to build their own HTML and CSS and ended up getting something that looked great... as long as you viewed it at the exact resolution of their designer's monitor. I had to go in and make it all work on mobile, which was a nightmare because their markup and styles were so badly organized. It took as much work as if they'd just given me PNGs.
More recently I received a bunch of designs from a designer who worked in Adobe XD. The designs were great, and what I got from XD was an interactive template and some very rough auto-generated CSS (mostly colors, fonts, and border radii). This was the sweet spot for me: no breaking out the color picker or guessing what letter-spacing they're using, but I could make the code work with my templating engine and make it responsive without having to rewrite bad code that they charged me for.
If you can find a designer that is great at both design and code, awesome! Keep them! But if not, chances are the most productive workflow is to let them do what they do best and just plan on doing the rest.
I would take a similar stance but say that anyone who has the title "UI Desginer" or "Web Designer" should have to know HTML/CSS. If you are designing UIs for the web, HTML and CSS are your medium, Photoshop not, that is just where you formulate your ideas.
You'll likely still need someone with sufficient JS skills. The key will be for the designers to think in such terms (i.e., components).
In nearly every (marketing) agency I've worked at, the designers envisioned themselves as creatives. "Boundaries? Not us. We live outside the box..." Trying to get them to understand you can have the same underlying structure and just bend it with CSS wasn't something they've wanted to imagine. The idea of reusing (read: not creating from scratch) isn't in their DNA.
Again, this isn't all web designers. But marketing agencies do a lot of non-enterprise design and dev.
Sure for a content-site template, blog, or something else fairly basic. This is not at all the case for things like art-directed super-custom designed sites like magazines, fashion brands, museums, etc, OR highly complex interactive SAAS web apps like the ones I work on. These have lots of unique considerations like complex animations, layered menus and controls, optimizing for change from mouse to touch interactions, handling the higher rate of people who use zoomed text on mobile devices, adapting to device safe areas in portrait and landscape, etc.
I am a designer and HTML/CSS coder so I am aware of the challenges from both directions.
From my experience I would suggest learning html/css coding but finding a creative person to do the actual design (colors, logo, white space, typography etc etc). I really doubt that it's possible to be good at everything - but html/css is 'just' coding - design however is a completely different story.
I'm interested and know how to implement everything on the front-end - structure and content (HTML), presentation and positioning (CSS), and interactivity (JavaScript).
The content would have to be provided by the client, but I can perfectly deal with the rest (if the client hasn't a designer, for instance).
If the client provides designs and interaction guidelines, no problem at all, I know (or will learn) how to implement them - using semantically appropriate HTML code, custom CSS and JavaScript (JS).
I really love a handcrafted package of HTML, CSS, and JS. That's what I would like to do, if there's demand - thence my question :).
Not OP, but I'd say a willingness and proven ability to learn far outweigh any particular tools. Proving ability to learn does require past experience, of course.
I think it helps a lot more to show that you understand styling principles (reusability, selector precedence) than it does to be able to make pixel-perfect implementations based only on knowledge off the top of your head. [0]
That being said, in order to have that understanding, you probably need to have some experience with CSS or similar.
Basically, hands-on CSS experience is the means not the ends.
[0]: Perhaps all of this is what you meant by having a "firm grasp of CSS".
Familiarity with CSS preprocessors would be considered big +.
A taste for good design as well ?
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