There, I said it. Web designer’s aren’t Superman.

WANTED: Graphic designer who can make beautiful graphics, code front-end designs, knows PHP, can make coffee..

Graphic design and front-end design ends at design. As it is, it takes four years to get a degree in this field, and back-end and front-end development use two completely different areas of the brain. This is why it irritates me so much when people post advertisements wanting a person who can do anything; there is a very limited amount of people who can both code and design, and I am lucky to be one of those few..

The man who does your front end can’t necessarily do your backend (pun intended)

The theories and psychology behind design are actually quite fascinating and take years to develop. It takes a certain kind of thinking to be able to do front-end design and nail these theories. Remember in grade school when they had you do those “mind maps” that were supposed to determine whether you were a mathematical thinker or if you were more of an artist? Designers, typically, fall into the realms of “artist” rather than the more logical “mathematical” types. There are maybe a handful of designers who can do both, but these are few and far between.

When hiring, please educate yourself.

So many people think that a developer and a designer are inter-changeable. Unfortunately, most times they are not. Most of the developers I know haven’t got a clue about how to do an aesthetically pleasing design that will deliver the message it needs to, and I know many designers who don’t have the capacity or time to go and learn the finer things of development, such as PHP or MySQL.

So as a final word…

Stop trying to hire both! Get one, and then another.