Creativity in Frontend Development

In recent years, “frontend developer” has become somewhat of a loaded term. There is a growing rift between two groups of developers with the same job title, but different responsibilities. This Great Divide can be observed in a simple LinkedIn job search:

A major cause of this identity crisis is the explosion of JavaScript. In addition to being everywhere on the front end of websites, a site’s backend could be running on a Node.js server. The analytics could be built with Cube.js. The authentication could be handled with Passport.js. Nowadays, two “frontend developers” could be standing next to each other and have little (if anything) in common. So what does the title even mean?

Somewhere in this bridge between design and development lies frontend design. A frontend designer:

• Understands the principles of UX design but may not spend hours creating wireframes, conducting research, and planning scenarios
• Has an eye for aesthetics but isn’t overly focused on font pairings, color palettes, or creating illustrations
• Understands the importance of backend development but probably isn’t starting up servers and writing backend logic

Of course these responsibilities vary from person to person, but the all-encompassing term “frontend”often leads to a lot of confusion. In the words of Atomic Design author Brad Frost:

“HTML is not a programming language. CSS is not a programming language. But because HTML and CSS are still technically code, frontend development is often put in the same bucket as Python, Java, PHP, Ruby, C++, and other programming languages. This misunderstanding tends to give many frontend developers, myself included, a severe identity crisis.”

Companies such as Optimizely have begun to address this by including frontend developers in the design team as UI Engineers, working alongside UX Researchers (helping to understand the customer’s needs) and Product Designers (overseeing the whole project from start to finish).

Searching “frontend designer” may not yield any results on Indeed, but it’s a role many developers find themselves in and one that is slowly starting to be addressed by companies. If it’s a role that interests you I encourage you to check out this article to learn more.