There is a misconception that frontend development is just about the colors, placing the buttons, etc. There is a huge difference between a design and a development. Let's look at it in more detail.

When we talk about design, it includes UX/UI. A designer is a person who designs a website or a web page without using code. The designer can use code too, like HTML CSS. Most of the designers know about basic HTML and CSS.

The designer uses tools like Figma, AdobeXD, etc for designing and prototyping. You can use these tools to design crazy-looking pages and decide the flow of the app. This plays an important role to make the experience of a website better.

Often these designs have a lot of functionalities. Consider navigating to a different page, consider a form you need to submit, or maybe send requests to your backend. Here comes the role of a frontend developer. The frontend developer is supposed to make the page functional. And this involves code.

Front-end development has evolved a lot and is still evolving. After all the frameworks we have like React, Vue, Angular, etc it is not the same as it was. There is a lot of powerful stuff you can do with these frameworks in no time which would take an eternity to do otherwise.

These frameworks provide a lot of crazy stuff. We have routers, we have state management, conditional rendering, component-based approach, etc. You can literally render a list of users with few lines of code. You can include a lot of other stuff like other libraries and packages.

Front-end is more about logic, you need to solve particular problems if you code the frontend. It might sound easy in the first place, but once you dig a little, you will find that it's a lot more than that. Even disabling a button is a task sometimes. Forms are crazy.

There are times when you're building complicated stuff and you don't even care about the design a lot. There are several platforms that are only desktop versions. There are CRMs where you have so much logic to play with. Handling files, inputs, users and showing data accordingly.

Similarly, there are places where you need to focus a lot on UI/UX. Consider CRED, or a Portfolio website. Design is a very important part at places. The user behavior can be very much different depending upon the design, you need that button so good that a user clicks.

A front-end developer can know design, but it's not necessary to know it. It gives you an upper edge if you know it, similarly for a designer it's good to know the basics of the web.

Both design and development are related but different. You can be both or one.

Thank you so much for reading.

I hope you liked it. If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave a comment below or feel free to reach out.