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What skills are usually required to be a front end developer?

What skills does the perfect front-end designer or front-end developer possess?

  • If you were looking for a front-end designer what technical skills would you expect or appreciate that they have?

  • Answer:

    Hmm....it depends on how much implementation you expect them to be doing. Assuming you have an ass-kicking front-end engineering team, the designer should know: HTML, CSS, and JS structure. Understand enough of it so the comps aren't asking for the impossible. Along similar lines, understanding modern web limitations. What's possible for each browser, which effects and UI conventions are standard on the web, and common connection speeds, processing capabilities, and screen sizes factor into a design. Prototyping ability. Sometimes the easiest way is just to show what you mean beyond a Photoshop file. Note this doesn't have to be raw HTML/CSS, you can communicate via a presentation or graphing tool. Copy and SEO knowledge. These are often lumped into design early on but broken out as discrete roles as a company gets bigger, and they're arguably only somewhat technical. If you don't have a front-end engineer, taking on parts of that role become important as well, things like: Code cleanliness. Writing clean code, maintainable, modular, etc. Performant code. Knowing what runs well on which browsers. Developer tools experience. Since you'll be writing the code, it makes sense to know the tools that engineers use. This can range from version control, to IDEs, to the command line. Testing. Testing the front-end is hard. Being able to do this frees the backend developer up to work on just the backend piece.

Allen Cheung at Quora Visit the source

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In my opinion, good designers should know: Bulletproof, semantic & with a passion for keeping up to date with the industry. Hardboiled Web Design by Andy Clarke and Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte should be on their Kindles. Enough for interactiony & AJAXy things. Basic working knowledge of or Understanding of the bigger picture - for example knowing how works, so you can work effectively with developers. Knowledge of fits in here. A move towards something like / etc; at least to demonstrate a willingness to take on new challenges and keep learning.

Jon Gold

It really depends upon the type of front-end being deployed such as web 2.0, jquery, Ajax blend, flash, flex, air, silverlight or otherwise. In any event, knowledge of underlying code is a huge advantage along with cognizance of user interface elements specific to that experience.

Christopher Rubin

Mathematics, specifically: Probability, Statistics, Linear Algebra, Geometry, Numbers Theory, Graph Theory Psychology Marketing Analytics Color Analytics Grammar Writing Marketing Segmentation Targeting HTML CSS HTML5 Javascript Paper drawings Adobe Illustrator Google Docs Drawing AJAX Back end knowledge

Abir Bhattacharyya

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