Start by realising that you're not going to BUILD a website or an app. You're merely designing how it looks and works. So leave the production to developers, please.

Only very few designers will be a good developer too, and vice versa. Maybe you're going to be one of them, but don't fall into despair if you're not the next Jesse Showalter. Teamwork is just as good !

So your question is actually quite wrong – you don't design for the development; you design for the user. And both design and development should work together to get the job done. Of course there will be trade-offs and incompatibilities in what you want to design (with your ideas and styles in mind) and what developers can do (with their tools, techniques, and frameworks). But that's a matter of good and even elaborate communication between you and developers. Keep an eye on the user and the stakeholders, and get on to it !

For the "why" behind web and app design, you might want to pick up any website, blog, or even some books about design in general. Make yourself familiar with the beauty and burdens of UX Design.

For the "how" to create designs, there are a zillion tools out there to get you started. Compared to sheer graphic or print design (which relies on the holy Adobetrinity of Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign), design tools for web and apps are a complete jungle, with really thousands of tools, hundreds of useful and reliable ones, and maybe a few dozen very popular ones. Sketch, Adobe XD, Figma, and others being some of them.

The "where" is a bit odd question. You mean a school ? Depending on your habitat, there's a chance of having a modern educational institution in your environment. Older design schools can be quite a bit behind in prepping you for digital design era, although they can be a fairly good starting point to learn the fundamentals in visual design.

Hope this helps to narrow down some areas of interest.

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst op Quora: Where can I learn graphic design for web and software development?"