Please, please, please for the love of all things do not use that god-forsaken term ‘front end designer’. If your job involves you using code, you are a developer. End of story. Yes, your role may require some design knowledge, but that doesn’t make you a designer. A designer – as I’m sure you appreciate – is someone who designs solutions to problems; usually in a tool like Sketch, XD or if they hate their developer colleagues, Photoshop.
You’re absolutely spot on that we need to reconsider the job title of front end developer. But I wold strongly suggest that the title UI developer fits better with the semantics of what people do when we’re talking about when we’re talking about specialists in HTML, CSS and interactional JS.
In addition, using the word designer only gives ammunition to the gatekeepers in this industry who proclaim people who only know HTML, CSS and interactional JS ‘aren’t real developers’. We have to be really careful with the language we use as it can – and does – have unintended consequences.
"Web-Stack" developer with a focus on accessibility design and development patterns, data visualization and DevOps automation.
Fell in love with Node, JS, SPA's and the JAMStack. Bye LAMP.
Please, please, please for the love of all things do not use that god-forsaken term ‘front end designer’. If your job involves you using code, you are a developer. End of story. Yes, your role may require some design knowledge, but that doesn’t make you a designer. A designer – as I’m sure you appreciate – is someone who designs solutions to problems; usually in a tool like Sketch, XD or if they hate their developer colleagues, Photoshop.
You’re absolutely spot on that we need to reconsider the job title of front end developer. But I wold strongly suggest that the title UI developer fits better with the semantics of what people do when we’re talking about when we’re talking about specialists in HTML, CSS and interactional JS.
In addition, using the word designer only gives ammunition to the gatekeepers in this industry who proclaim people who only know HTML, CSS and interactional JS ‘aren’t real developers’. We have to be really careful with the language we use as it can – and does – have unintended consequences.
Excellent comment. I think this is really, really important to note.