Mike Girouard's Blog

There are a lot of professions that have emerged from the web: designers, developers, strategists, search engine optimists, information architects, usability and accessibility consultants, the list goes on…

Today, I’d like to talk about the first two. I wouldn’t go so far to say that the titles should be considered harmful by any means, rather we have just outgrown our job titles!

In the last three jobs that I have worked, there seems to large differences of opinions in the definitions of the job descriptions of web designers and web developers. As most folks in management see it, the definitions are pretty obvious: designers make the pretty pictures; developers bring them to life with code. However, the web poses an interesting problem: where does slicing, XHTML and CSS come in? Is it something that only developers do because it’s code? Is it something that designers are responsible for because of the constraints the technologies pose on their designs? Is this an opportunity for a third job to be created?

Roger Johansson of 456 Berea St. wrote a post about struggling with the two definitions:

On the about page of [my website] I used to call myself a “developer/designer/occasional writer”. It’s a bit confusing, and I still find it hard to know what to answer when someone asks me what I do for a living. Am I a Web designer? A Web developer? A Web programmer? All of them? Neither? It really is a difficult question to give a simple answer to.

It’s good to know I’m not the only one stuck on this problem. Later on in the post, Roger says that he’ll use a different description depending on who he’s talking to. I find myself doing that too; and if three of my past jobs each offer their own interpretations of the titles, that tells me that the titles themselves are too general.

At Full Sail

At Full Sail, students who specialized in design were not only responsible for the interface design, but were also responsible for slicing, XHTML and CSS coding. Anyone who has ever done a site front to back knows the importance of designer who is aware of what CSS coders do every day. I’ll even go so far to say that I’ll hire a slightly less experienced designer who knows CSS than a slightly more experienced designer who has only been working in print his entire career.

At Hydra Studio

At Hydra, we had a designer, someone who handled XHTML and CSS buildouts, and I developed the applications. This is where I found myself describing myself as a “Web Application Developer”, which I now find to be a much better title for folks like me who prefer to code the actual application. Our designer was (and still is) one of the best web designers I’ve seen to this day — and he doesn’t know a single line of CSS. That said, I recall a few times where we had to go back to him and teach him a few things about the various constraints the browser puts on designing for the web. In this particular instance it would have been incredibly helpful to have a CSS savvy designer.

At M2 Systems

M2 wasn’t really a job, but rather a full-time contract that was for six months. Still, this provided a very different environment for me to work in. I was contracted to develop a PHP framework to communicate with a Java-based web service. There wasn’t really much design involved with the project, just coding the framework and building “gray screens” for folks to get it working. Since I was a contractor, I didn’t get a real title; so I came up with my own: “Front-end Engineer” (a very appropriate title used often Yahoo!). I handled the PHP middleware, XHTML and CSS, and JavaScript development. Ever since then I’ve been in love with the Front-end Engineer title. The problem is, nobody really knows what that means. Furthermore, some people still don’t get how PHP can be a front-end language.

Magnani Caruso Dutton

Finally here I am, the Sr. Developer at MCD. Here there are many designers and many developers. With so many people on staff, designers pretty much stick to the design, and developers code CSS all day. Occasionally some JavaScript comes in with the rest of the work, but even that is a rarity. For some reason, I found this to be a big surprise. I really did think there would be some kind of application that needs building but when you have heavyweight clients like HBO, Capital one, and Discover, all those companies have in-house developers who integrate the pages we build into their application.

In the end I would have to say that I’m going to try to avoid the terms “web designer” and “web developer” from now on, favoring more specific titles in their place. I wouldn’t go so far to say that the titles should be considered harmful by any means, rather we have just outgrown our job titles!