As a side note, you don't have to know CSS/HTML to be a web designer. As a matter of fact, in most places I've worked, web designers did the graphic part on Photoshop and web developers sliced the images and wrote the HTML/CSS.
I don't know why this was downvoted, I totally agree with that. In fact, my co-founder, who is a graphic designer, knows next to nothing about HTML and CSS and I like it that way. It's his job to come up with nice designs and it's my job to make them work on a computer screen. Obviously we discuss things so he doesn't design stuff that are completely impossible to do in HTML/CSS or simply infeasible for some reason, but I try to give him as much artistic freedom as possible while shielding him from technical constraints. It worked out well so far.
>It's his job to come up with nice designs and it's my job to make them work on a computer screen. Obviously we discuss things so he doesn't design stuff that are completely impossible to do in HTML/CSS or simply infeasible for some reason, but I try to give him as much artistic freedom as possible while shielding him from technical constraints.
IMO you are the web designer he is acting like an apprentice. I can see how you might want to insulate from the technical constraints in effort to push the boundaries, but if the design is not considering the user's interactions, accessibility, browser limitations, SEO as well as things like calls to action and the design goals (profit or throughput or whatever) then they're not doing web design.
I'd say from your description you're a web designer employing a graphic artist.
Just 'shop-ing a design and transforming it to markup and styles tends to be print design that is put online rather than web design.
Not so sure about that. JavaScript is a quite advanced language, below the surface. To be able to do anything non-trivial in JavaScript, you have to be a developer and have to have a good understanding of Computer Science.
Also, I don't do any "design", in the creative sense. I implement the design of my partner. So I think your terminology is wrong.
JavaScript for AJAX and loading new information would be developer yes, because that is all about querying and interfacing with the back-end.
Simple visual JavaScript effects for enhancing presentation and interface would be web-designer.
To me the key part of the term "web-designer" is web... you are creating design using the assembly languages of web browsers: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and small quick-to-load chunks of graphics. Drawing is just the first planning step and there is nothing that makes it "web" specific other than an intention. Whereas in "graphic" design this is the end result. A graphic designer designs instructions for a graphics display process to display graphics, a web designer designs instructions for a web browser to display web pages.
