The real difficulty is not knowing what your job title should be, or indeed what it means. The problem is knowing what your client / employer / recruiter THINKS it means.

I stopped calling myself a front-end developer after last year when the consensus changed to mean ‘JavaScript programmer who knows three frameworks and dreams in Node.js and Grunt’ rather than someone who can build a site in HTML/CSS/jQuery.

My current title is UI/UX Engineer but the ‘engineer’ part just means ‘more senior to an analyst’ rather than anything concrete. But now I’m working exclusively on web applications rather than sites, removing ‘web’ and adding ‘UI/UX’ makes sense.

We struggled to name our newly-formed group at my current employer. We shifted from ‘UI’ to ‘UI/UX’ to ‘Inraction Design’ and finally simply settled on ‘Design’. We sit between the Business Analysts and the Development team in the SDLC, we analyze, wireframe, prototype and write production HTML/CSS. The only word that covers all of that accurately is Design.

Jeffrey,
what a wonderful read. It reminds me of one of the first pieces by you I ever read.
I can no longer find it online but still have it as PDF, frequently shared :)
Style vs Design

I love your writing – your personal tone and angle, combined with your professional insights make your posts such a pleasure to read. Thank you—as always—for starting and continuing to write.
x

What you want to call yourself all depends upon location too, what is the technological cultural environment you live in, putting aside the world is your client base via the net I still get a lot of my work through word of mouth and actually meet and greet local businesses. In this way of explaining what I do/provide I keep it simple and boiled down to the basics of, yes I makes website and do graghic design (freelance jack-of-all-trade punk). I am fortunate that I have not had to really give myself a title as it has ben a matter of can I do the job.

All the titles I ever gave myself have passed away to where they belong. They were always a fiction anyway, designed to grasp the moment. Am I a web designer? I sure as heck don’t know anymore, having been swept away by the avalanche of the latest web-cool.

That avalanche has been, like most other stuff, created by the culture into which we are born and in which we try to find our identity. Emblazoned above this ever-filling pit of web design advice and help is the advisory: “The more complex it is the better it is”.

And the more complex it is the more one needs a ‘specialist’ in the driver’s seat. It appears that I, who built my fist website and grew up in the humble, generous humanity of Zeldman, have reached my use-by date.

Strangely, the thing that gives me courage and the desire to question everything, is the phrase “This to shall pass”. All that is not in service of simplicity and information will wither and fall.

All the best Jeffrey!

An ideal read to take into the New Year. Thank you, sir.

Thank you Jeffrey! You make our job more human. Glad we are moving in the same direction.

Thank you for putting this into words. It’s hard sometimes as a developer/designer to decide on an suitable explanation for what I do and can lead to job-title-paranoia. I’m a designer. And that’s good.