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24 ways to impress your friends

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Actually; been there, done that

I agree with Andy Croll on this one and I believe, these questions are to be answered first: who is a “designer” and who is a “front end developer”. Which set of skills is required to be called as either one of them?

Latest articles about this subject, mostly assume that, both the designer and the front end developer (and even the back end developer in some cases) are the same person. This perspective has its pros and cons (subject of a different debate) but from my little experience in the field, I see most companies follow the (somewhat) “traditional” approach: the “designer” does the mockup on photoshop, the “front end developer” turns it into markup and css, and the “back end developer” does the server-side coding.

Traditional approach includes three different roles that have borders (although they are grey in some cases). Considering these roles are filled with people qualified in their “own” field and they have proper communication between them, I don’t see a problem with this approach.

On the other hand, the company I work for embraces the approach presented in this article. I am the designer and the front end developer. However, “we don’t skip photoshop”. When I start to design a project in photoshop, I always have the markup, css and javascript functionality in my mind. Maybe this doesn’t help me being faster on css but it surely helped me being faster on photoshop. And I believe “be faster and tidier on photoshop” suggestion is the other side of this coin.

As of now, mocking up in markup as suggested in this article is related to the audience. What is the use of css3 goodness if 90% of your visitors are supposed to be ie users in a developing country?