| By Michael Girouard |
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| April 8, 2008 02:00 AM EDT |
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Mike Girouard's BlogThere 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!
