Don’t use the word Web in your job titles…
… and the industry will be a much happier place. The titles of Web Designer and Web Developer should be binned, they’re too broad and misleading.
How often has this conversation happened to you:
Me: Hi, nice to meet you, what do you do?
Other Person: Oh, I’m a Web Designer
Me: Cool, what do you do then?
Other Person: Well I spend most of my time in Photoshop creating graphics.
Me: Do you code HTML? CSS?
Other Person: Yeah quite a bit actually, I’m learning jQuery at the minute.
Me: Great, will I have seen anything you’ve worked on?
Now if you forced that person to not use the word Web in their job title and instead they had to replace it with something more descriptive the conversion could have gone like this:
Me: Hi, nice to meet you, what do you do?
Other Person: Oh, I’m a Visual Designer mainly, I do some Front-End Development as well.
Me: Cool, will I have seen anything you’ve worked on?
Makes more sense to me, I instantly know what that person does.
Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse.
I’m not exactly sure of the context leading up to the tweet but it would seem to me that if the person in Elliots tweet had said he was a Visual Designer looking for someone to do the Front-End Development for his designs, things would have been much clearer.
There’s also the question of specialisation which I don’t have the energy to go into in this post, however I know of many teams that have people who only work on the Visual Design and people who only work on the Front-End Development and it’s a collaborative process from the start. If you work as a Freelancer your skill set has to be much broader out of necessity.
I think the time of using Web Designer/Developer as a catch all title needs to come to an end, it’s fine if you’re telling your Mum’s friend what you do for a living, but not between other professionals in the industry. Be more descriptive!
13 Comments
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mikek 17th, February 2010 at 11:36 am
I think using the word 'Web' within a job title helps describe your job to people who aren't familiar with our industry.
A front-end developer could be someone who makes bumpers for cars.
As you so rightly state, its all about context.
Ryan Taylor 17th, February 2010 at 11:40 am
I agree Mike. For non-industry professionals by all means use Web in your title to describe what you do. But to other professionals we should be much more descriptive.
Rob 17th, February 2010 at 12:21 pm
I also see this in Project Management. Again I think it's about context.
Description of "Web" PM conveys a negative image to a "Regular" PM. It's almost belittling in their eyes. A "Web PM is not quite a "Real" PM.
But to somebody in the web industry this would indicate the require specialisation for the job.
Personally I tend not to use the Web prefix.
Paul Annett 17th, February 2010 at 12:56 pm
This totally depends who you're talking to. If you're talking to industry people, it would be best to specify if you're front-end dev, ex designer etc. If you're talking to non-industry people they won't have a clue what these titles mean, so the term "web designer" is all they're looking for.
Unfortunately, that title does cheapen the role (your uncle's half-cousin's dog, etc).
Adrian Westlake 17th, February 2010 at 1:13 pm
I have always found people's job titles to be pretty unimportant to what they actually do. There will never be a two or three word phase that sums up what you actually do for everyone, and adding 'senior' or 'executive' isn't going to impress anyone.
Ryan Taylor 17th, February 2010 at 1:32 pm
@Rob & @Paul - agree with both of you.
@Adrian - I'm not saying that a your job title should sum up everything you do just point the person you're talking to in the general direction.
Peter 18th, February 2010 at 5:55 pm
I tend to agree with the above comments about it depending who you are speaking to. A "visual designer" to me is even more vague than web designer. At least if you say Web designer, those of us who are not in "the industry" (which is in danger of being a little elitist) know that it has something to do with the web.
Emily Heath 20th, February 2010 at 3:15 pm
This is at a slight tangent but has the term Visual Designer replaced Graphic Designer now and if so, why? Does Graphic designer tend to imply 'for print' and so we use Visual designer instead?
Just wondering...
Ryan Taylor 20th, February 2010 at 3:24 pm
@Emily - That was my thinking behind it yes. But the point of the post isn't for me to define what job titles people should us but instead to try and encourage people to be more descriptive among other professionals.
Martin Bean 22nd, February 2010 at 1:09 pm
I think someone needs to read their "About" page ; )
Ryan Taylor 22nd, February 2010 at 1:20 pm
@Martin - Where on my "About" page do I call myself a Web Designer or Web Developer? Apart from the job titles given to me by companies I've worked for that were out of my control.
Adam 22nd, March 2010 at 5:16 am
isn't it "coders" do the HTML/CSS/JS, etc...
and "designers" handle the graphics, fonts, colors, etc...
so someone who does both is then a "web designer" or no?
ha. and what if you are a "senior VP web designer"? just asking!
Matt 27th, April 2010 at 11:42 pm
Nice post, this has also been bugging me for some time. A little thought into creating job titles would go a long way.
Adam, that's what I used to think but I think it depends where you live. Here in New Zealand web designers generally only do design work, and they may work in a web design firm who has no-one in-house with the ability to code (stupid as it seems, although some firms do develop also, but the roles would still be separated).
However from what I can gather on Boagworld podcasts I know that in the UK a web designer would probably be expected to knock some code together at some point as well as be heavily involved with the design process.