The last little while I’ve begun to notice that some front end designers and developers seem to have a view of themselves as less then back end programmers or designers. I went through this too when I first graduated from school and started to become a part of web design community. All the popular blogs were by guys building web apps using Ruby or Python. I actually remember going to a blog of a HTML/CSS expert and actually thinking to myself, “All this guy does is HTML and CSS?” Now, of course, I realize how hard it is to make a lot of the designs I get in HTML and CSS. I really wish I could remember who that guy was because his blog looked pretty cool, well, at least in my memory.

Front end web people are just as important to the whole process as anyone else in the loop. We are the people that make the part that people see and interact with. In a lot of cases, you’re also the person that has to take what the designer has given you and make it work with the functionality that the programmer has created. Sometimes it seems half my job is explaining to designers why something isn’t possible and the other half usually ends up making it possible. Front end web designers are the people that take flat designs and turn them into something interactive and that can be a lot harder than most people think. Front end developers should never sell themselves short with what they can do. Especially now with browsers speeding up their JavaScript adding HTML5 support, the things front end developers can do is jumping by leaps and bounds.

A few years ago, I became obsessed with learning Flash and ActionScript and the more I learned, the more I started hearing about Flex Builder. It seemed to me at the time if you were doing serious Flash work and you wanted the rest of the community to take you seriously, you had to be building everything using Flex Builder. But FB isn’t built to do the simple stuff and as I figured out, it doesn’t really matter what you use to build your project but how it looks and works in the end. I work with HTML/CSS/JS and Flash. Those are the only things I have time to do. We have a couple of guys that do the back en programming. Their HTML skills reside somewhere in 1997 and they’ve barely heard of CSS.

It takes a lot of skill to be able to rebuild a design in pixels. If that’s your skill, you should be proud of it. With the upcoming advances in web technology, front end developers are going to be even more important.