Can someone with no artistic ability learn web design?

There are a lot of design jobs on the User Experience side that are not so much about creating unique aesthetic experiences. If you work at a large company like Google for example, they already have their brand and design system ("Material Design") mostly figured out with prebuilt components for things like buttons and forms. But they have many many complex products with lots of different pages, and they need an army of designers to help figure out how to compose those existing design components together, make a few new ones, and work all the complexity of the UX and business logic into the design. For some designers, this is a let down because they went to art school and really are not excited about being a corporate cog in the wheel. But it's an opportunity to work on a lot of interesting design problems and you don't need to know much about color theory.

As you're creating your own portfolio, I think it's okay to lean heavily on css libraries like Semantic UI, Bootstrap, Material Design, Foundation, Ionic (good for PWA's). There's a lot to choose from and it's easy to customize them without having to reinvent the wheel. Make something that does something cool, and looks presentable. Doesn't have to be flashy.

Another useful tool, if you do want to dabble in picking colors is this neat tool from Adobe: https://color.adobe.com/create You can use these constraints like 'monochromatic' or 'complementary' to help you pick colors that look good together. And you can check out the 'Explore' and 'Trends' tabs to just steal other people's colors palletes.

A lot of businesses want something kind of derivative and vaguely trendy. They want a design that signals: we're dependable and normal but we're not stuck in the 90's, we're paying attention. Something can be over-designed just as a person can be overdressed.

A couple other things to keep in mind: a lot of people in creative fields struggle with their work not matching their own expectations at the beginning of a learning curve. It's hard, but it's healthy, it means that you have high standards and can tell the difference between good and bad design. And each project you build helps close that gap incrementally.

The job market has softened a bit for designers recently but it still very hot for software developers, so that's something to take into consideration (source: friend who works on the career services side at a bootcamp). The ratio of developers to designers varies, but it's definitely many more developers. There are 8 devs on my team and 1 designer. If you're doing well on the coding side, that might be a better way to get into the industry. This was my strategy. I like design, and get to sometimes dabble in design in my current role, and I hope to add more design responsibility in the future, but for now it makes sense to be a developer.

Hi. Great question and answer! I too have real deficiencies in the design area. I have two suggestions that i found helpful. One the cigarette and alcohol industry have huge professional marketing and design experts working within their limitations and i always note what colors and designs those industries use for not only their web pages but also print advertising. Two quilting is huge, lots of work and a bad color combination can ruin many many weeks of work. So for quick visual aids check out the color wheels, design ideas and thoughts on scale and proportion are often quick and to the point. This is probably too basic but it is where I started and also to gain some confidence with my own mind and eyes. Michele