Career · 08 November 2024 · 6 min read
From web designer to frontend developer: what actually changed
I spent my first years shipping static websites as a designer. Here's what carried over when the job title changed to frontend developer — and what didn't.
My first few years in this industry were spent as a web designer — building responsive sites, thinking in mockups and breakpoints, handing off pages that mostly worked because the scope was small enough to hold in your head.
The shift to frontend developer wasn't really about learning React, though that came with it. It was learning to think in state instead of screens — the same page now had a dozen versions depending on what the user had done, what had loaded, and what had failed.
The design instinct didn't disappear, it just moved earlier in the process. Knowing what a layout is supposed to feel like before a single component exists still shapes how I structure a page — which parts should be simple JSX and which parts need to actually manage state.
Eight years in, the title has changed twice and the stack has changed more than that. The part of the job that hasn't moved is the same one from the first static site: does this hold together for the person using it, not just for the person who built it.