- So, what are the differences between a web designer role
and a web developer role?
Let's look at that in today's video.
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Welcome back.
My name is Tim Buchalka
with another programming tip of the day.
And we're looking at the differences between a web designer
and a web developer because they are very different.
So, let's start out by talking first about a web designer.
So, what does a web designer do?
Well, they focus more on the design
of a particular page or website or whatever it is,
things like the layout, the look and feel, the colour,
the fonts that are employed, the logos,
and perhaps they create logos, images,
just in general the look and feel of the website.
That's what the web designer will focus on.
The web developer, on the other hand,
their goal is to take the design
that they've got from someone,
in this case the web designer, and to make that work.
So, basically they focus more on the functionality
of the website in terms of getting buttons to do something,
getting data saved, basically taking that design
as I've said and getting that to actually work
so that someone can actually visit that page or website
and get it to actually do something productive
rather than focusing on how it looks.
So, they're basically implementing
the web designer's design.
All right.
Now that we've done that, let's look at some of the tools
of the trade that a typical web designer will look at.
We'll do that first,
and then we'll talk about web developers.
So, web designers, common tools that you'd use
would be Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator,
Sketch is another one, but also Adobe XD is another product,
those types of products.
So, it's more a graphical product or a prototyping type tool
that they can actually take the design
and put it into some format,
a PDF format or some other format
so that they can actually see
what their design is going to work with.
So, they can do a prototype, if you will,
of what the UI is gonna look like.
When they're finished and they've got an idea in their head
or they've actually put it into one of these tools,
they can give that to a web developer
who can then try and implement what they've done
and actually create a website out of it.
All right.
So, that's web designer tools.
Let's then look at some typical web developer tools.
Well, common things would be an editor
for editing HTML or CSS code or JavaScript.
So, editors like Sublime Text is one,
VS Code, Visual Studio Code, Atom, they're common editors,
but also full-blown IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA
or also Adobe Dreamweaver.
They are just two examples of packages
that are really designed there for web developers.
There's really an abundance of packages.
I listed just a couple here, basically a tonne more.
Now web developers, in addition to knowing packages
and knowing certain packages,
need to have a good knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
as an absolute minimum.
And I've talked about this before in a previous video.
So, check that out if you want to find out more
about what these tools are and what they look like.
They would be the starting point
for a typical web developer to understand
to those technologies, those languages
before they can then move on to other things as well.
Now web designers, on the other hand,
they need obvious good graphical skills,
they need to have the skills to be able to design
and create these things.
But very importantly here, web developers don't,
basically a web developer can go through
his or her entire career with zero artistic abilities.
And yes, I'm actually proof of that
because I'm in that scenario.
I've been a web developer basically in previous jobs
that I've actually had, and I've got zero artistic skills.
As much as I would love to have them,
my skill is more coding, and that's my forte.
And I've gone through my entire career
without having any artistic abilities.
So, if you're thinking as a web developer
that you may need to have some sort of artistic skills,
yes, they'd probably be a bonus,
but you certainly don't need them
because traditionally you find in a lot of cases,
particularly when you start working for larger companies,
there's a segregation of duties.
So, there's a specific web design section
or department or a person depending on how big the company,
the role is, how big the jobs that need to be fixed,
were actually created, I just want to try to say,
compared to a web developer who's just like a separate role.
So, usually there's two separate roles
and there's actually a handoff.
So, the web designer is more engaging with the end user
to try and get an idea on what they're trying to achieve
and they'll create the design.
Then they'll actually bring it to the web developers
to actually implement.
So, completely separate.
So, it's fairly rare for someone to be a web designer
and web developer.
It's normally a focused one or the other.
But if you're a rare person who's got good artistic skills
and good web developer skills,
that's probably a big bonus for you.
All right.
So, another question that I get asked a lot
is in terms of web designers and web developers,
who gets paid more?
Well, in general, web developers will get paid more
because rightly or wrongly they're seen as more valuable
in general than a web designer.
Now that's obviously not the case.
The specific cases will override these generalisations.
But in general, web development will be seen as a skill
that's more in demand and basically paid more as a result.
So, in my opinion, it's actually harder in many aspects
to be a good web developer,
and that's because with web design,
if you've got good artistic skills,
you can keep those skills up.
There's not really a lot of packages
you need to continually relearn.
But as a web developer,
technology is changing so fast,
new versions or packages are coming out,
and you need to be on top of things
like HTML specifications and all those sorts of things,
specification for JavaScript,
you need to be on top of those as a developer
and be ahead of the pack so that you're constantly there
wherever the market's going,
and it is changing really, really quickly.
Contrast that to a web designer,
once you've got your basic skills
and you've got your basic skills and packages
like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator or Adobe XD
or whatever it is, then you can maintain those
and make a good living without having
to continually reinvest in learning new packages.
Now it's not to say you won't have to do some relearning.
My point is, that in general, in my experience,
having seen both sides of it working with web designs
and so forth, they tend to be a bit more static,
basically they don't need to update their skills
as often and as much, in my opinion,
as web developers need to.
So, basically there's a lot more to learn
and keep up to date with as a web developer
is what I'm trying to say.
And that's probably the reason for the extra dollars
that typically a web developer will actually get
compared to a web designer.
All right.
So, I hope that helped.
If you've got any questions, feel free to leave a comment
and I'll get back to you.
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