13 Web Designer interview questions and answers

This question is designed to give you insight into the web designer’s thought process. A good designer doesn’t jump in blindly; good questions include “What isn’t working on the current website?,” “Who is the target audience for this project?,” or “What are you optimizing for?”

Good designers are thorough and thoughtful, but they should also be able to prioritize and deliver assets under pressure.

This is an opportunity for the designer to show you how they approach their work. You want to look for evidence that a candidate thinks hard about the problem they’re trying to solve, and that they are committed to seeing the design through to the end. You also want to make sure that as a client you have opportunities to review the work and give feedback.

This question should help you see how thoughtful a designer is. Good prospects should be up-to-date on the latest design trends and able to articulate how they’ve used those trends in their recent work while putting their own spin on them.

Good designers should feel comfortable committing to milestones so you can make sure you’re on the same page, review their work, and stagger payments as objectives are completed. This is especially helpful for larger projects. It's often a good idea to break them up into phases or smaller pieces and pay as each milestone is reached, especially if you haven't worked with the designer before.

Your goal should be to find someone capable of solving design problems, not someone who creates them. Great designers shouldn't resist making changes to their work, and mature designers appreciate and incorporate constructive feedback.

This question reveals a web designer’s work style. You should expect the right professional to emphasize the importance of organization, good communication with relevant parties, and accountability.

You want to make sure that the designer is at least familiar with the principles of web development so that they do not inadvertently create a development bottleneck. Beware of designers who just want to hand off their work and call it a day. They should also be able to work with developers to deliver their designs in the agreed upon file format and level of specification. It might also be a good idea to negotiate an agreement to modify the designs if the original turns out to be unfeasible or there are difficulties implementing it.

Good designers should be able to defend and support their work in a professional, respectful way. You want designers who believe enough in their work not to be steamrolled but also who won't be difficult to work with or refuse to adapt.

This question is designed to give you a sense of what the designer is like to work with. If the professional tells you that their last several experiences were less than stellar and that their clients demanded too much too quickly, or that the client didn’t appreciate their designs, that’s a flag that they may be difficult to work with.

Most designers like to work with high-resolution images, but this can create problems for users on older computers or who have anything less than a blazing fast Internet connection, and ultimately hurt your SEO efforts. Designers can avoid this by compressing their images (reducing the resolution and shrinking the file size without altering the dimensions). This can easily be done in Photoshop, but other web tools exist as well.

Your web developer will be responsible for most of the performance optimization on your website. And there are a lot of ways to optimize a website's performance. However, your designer should definitely mention compressing images to reduce loading times. (Studies show that long page loading times can drive visitors away. Your bounce rate is the number of people who go to just one page on the site and leave immediately. It’s widely believed that Google factors bounce rates into its results, so fast loading times and low bounce rates are important for SEO.) Other topics to consider are what sort of mobile design to use (responsive sites vs. an entirely separate mobile site), making sure pages load progressively, and limiting the number of fonts on a page. Good designers may also talk about working directly with your developers and communicating frequently during the implementation process.

Nobody likes it when the direction or scope of a project shifts, but it happens. How a professional responds in this situation will tell you a lot about what they’re like to work with.