When I grow up, I want to be an interface designer

Andrei has a very interesting article over at Design by Fire: When I grow up, I want to be an interface designer.

Based on his personal experience and opinion that interface design will be what graphical and automobile design have been in the middle of the 20th century – exciting and challenging – he gives some advice on how one can work towards being a good interface designer.

He recommends that with a blog, you can essentially cover all three main aspects of interface design:

• Visual design

• Information design

• Interaction design

The easiest, most direct method to practice the craft of interface design is in the creation of your own blog. Not a blog generated by templates, but a blog where you get to write some XHMTL code and control the entire design process from start to finish.

Why a blog? Let him answer the question himself:

You may be asking yourself why I would recommend that all interface designers use blogs as means to practice the craft? Aren’t blogs too simplistic to be of any use? In some respects they are, but the point is to continually find new ways practice the craft outside of work. Blogs require all the necessary components an interface designer needs to be able to design. Blogs have visual, information and interaction components all wrapped into one project that can be crafted by a single person.

Of these three, interaction design obviously is the hardest to practice:

The crutch in all of this is that blogs don’t lend themselves immediately to practicing interaction design skills. Since a blog is fairly focused on delivering and reading content, there’s very little complex interaction that occurs with it.

Nevertheless, you have possibilities to practice in this field as well and Andrei gives some examples where you could start off.

All in all, a great article in a line of other great articles from him.