You A Designer or A Developer?

Design or Development

Are you more developer than you are a designer?

They both are problem solvers and If you ❤️ solving problems… you’ll ❤️ this blog post.

You might even realise that all along you were actually more of a designer and vice-versa

A few weeks ago…

I was texting a random person and it played out something like this 👇

Tara: So you a designer too??

Me: Nah, I just make really cool looking thumbnails

Tara: thumbnails uh? like the anime fan art stuff on your insta looks super dope

Me: ohh the anime stuff, ain’t that kinda similar to designing UI stuff

Tara: so you do UI design

Me: nah, I just design beforehand so I don’t have to spend time tweaking CSS and stuff.

…

I was a web developer building personal projects, blogging and making videos on youtube. At least that’s how I identified myself

I was also making anime fan art/wallpaper on insta, breathtaking thumbnails and designing UI beforehand to make my dev process smoother

The whole conversation with Tara sparked a tiny thought

“I’ve got both dev and design skills (a designer asked me if i was a designer), and it’s about time I started earning as an individual”

I really enjoyed building ideas from my head to reality, i,e both designing and developing the project

But if I’m going to work in a team, and

1. If I’m the designer, I can’t work on building it
2. If I’m the developer, I’ll be handed a design to build
3. There’s no way I can do both, companies hire specialized individuals cuz they have major time constraints [and specialized individuals are better in their domain]

So Should I do Design Roles or Development Roles

I could do either of them as my profession and the other as a hobby, but

“If you’re good at something, don’t do it for free”

- Heath Ledger’s Joker

I had to find if I was more of a Designer or a Developer

Finding Out My Identity

If I was going to monetize one of my skills, it’d be the one that’d give me the freest time so I’d have time for my hobby projects or anything else in that matter.

So I spent some time thinking, talking to other people who could both design and develop (turns out a lot of developers “esp frontend” also design), asking if they’d rather only be a designer or a developer and here are my conclusions

You are More Designer If

1. You have 0 Idea why Data Structures and Algorithms[DSA] exists ffs
2. You love playing around with CSS, tweaking every minute detail
3. You lose 90% of your interest in a project, the second the designs are handed out to you.
4. You don’t understand people who spend time leet coding
5. You are proud of the out-of-the-box solutions you come up with
6. You like physics more than math 😝

You are More Developer If

1. You know that just knowing DSA helps you write better more efficient code
2. You just really really hate CSS, when you get PR of slight tweaks in the CSS, you get really mad
3. You’re so glad the designers handed you the UI designs, now you can just quickly jump to implementing the functionality
4. LeetCoding is your go-to time-pass, f*ck chess, sudoku, etc
5. Even increasing the performance by 0.01% gives you an orgasm
6. You like math more than physics 😝

Arigato

TL;DR

A direct differentiation is that designers are creative problem solvers, developers are analytical problem-solvers

Finally….

If you found this article amusing…

you might find my tweets even more amusing

twitter/lucidmach I tweet about the projects I’m working on. Right Now I’m designing and developing my personal website/portfolio site

A Sample Page from my Portfolio

If you’re curious about that anime art from the conversation

insta/lucidmach I post anime wallpapers and sometimes AMVs

A Sample Anime Wallpaper Just for You