Web designer and front-end developer: two sides of one coin?

Faced with these two concepts, from first glance, one may not notice the difference between them. 

Not surprising. Since describing briefly, both of them are engaged in creating the external shell of the website, creating the ‘skeleton’ of the site, selecting the color scheme, processing images, and adding effects. So, where is the difference? Let’s get a quick look and try to spot the difference.

To explain it simply, a web designer is an expert, who is precisely aware of at which place of the web page you look in the first place, what colors annoy you, and what kind of animation or image will make you make one or another click. Don’t worry, you are not so predictable. It’s a laborious process to please you.

The goal of the web designer is to interest and entertain you via website visualization.

What does the web developer do? It implements the idea of a web designer, turning the layout into a working product.

But a web developer can do design, you say. Sure, it can. Able to. But believe me, you do not want to entrust the development of the design to an engineer. 

Why? Because the peculiarity of the web developer's work is to create not a client-orientated product, but the right one. The one which builds according to cannons and trends, putting the ultimate success to a greater extent on the content and case.

Such a product might look great. I bet it will. But there is always a chance that some things will still be missed.

But the difference lies not only in the attitude and approach to work. It would be too simple, doesn’t it? It also includes skills and tools that are used in the process of creating the design and website development.

The web designer operates mainly with:

• graphic editors (Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Corel PaintShop Pro, Creative Cloud, Inkscape, GIMP, Fotor);
• small auxiliary programs for choosing colors (0to255, Color lovers);
• fonts programs (Font Flipper, Photoshop Font Detector, Prototypo);
• programs for work with pictures (Subtle Patterns, IconStore, UI Faces, Coverr, Placeit).

A web developer usually also uses many of these programs, maybe this is one of the reasons why there is confusion in these concepts, but still, the main tools of a web developer are directly those that relate to the 'skeleton':

• code editors (Komodo Edit, Visual Studio Code, Aptana, Sublime Text);
• inspectors (built-in Safari and Chrome);
• debuggers (Firebug, Fiddler);
• testers.

Recently, I read an appealing thought that web developers and web designers have one common important detail: most customers do not want to hear about this differentiation. And that's a shame. Such ignorance may have much influence on the final product. But that’s a different story.

For me, the main difference lies in differences in concepts such as ‘create’ and ‘build’.