The designer, the developer and the devigner
Traditionally in the website building and maintenance sector of the IT industry, there have been two sub-specialisations: the web designer and the web developer1.
To define my terminology more clearly, I’ll risk stating the obvious: web designers tended to have more of a graphic design background. These people might end up doing the ‘front end’ work on websites. They’d do the colour scheme, set the font, maybe do the logo and icons if they were good enough. As websites started to share the space with or become web applications, designers started to take responsibility for the user interface (UI) aspects, although UI design almost seems to have become yet another sub-sub-specialisation of it’s own. Web developers typically had more of a programming background and worked on the ‘back end’ of the website or web application. Server side and client side scripting, maybe some server and/or database administration.
but as the web has matured, the line between these two archetypes has continued to blur and it is this middle ground that I personally find myself standing on. Read more...
