Doing so in such a new industry is expected as everyone tries to make sense of how it all works, but people, listen to me, RESIST! It’s a new industry, take control of what you do within you job, don’t get boxed in!

I also think we all need to be aware the web industry could change as drastically as it started. All dev work has the potential to get mopped up by ‘off the shelf’ technology. Current example – who needs custom cms when you got wordpress. I not saying that though – clients do. Whay pay a dev when all I need is a designer and wordpress.

So I say lets not get comfortable with these job titles just yet.

I guess the only thing I would add to this is that it’s worth remembering that to most small to medium sized clients, no matter what you try and brand yourself as, whether it be a UI Designer, Front End Designer, Creative Director etc., to them you are always just “a web designer”.

Graphic designer: a person who PLANS, ANALYZES, AND CREATES visual solutions.

Some people are even smart enough to do both print and web design. Obviously, there are differences, I’m not saying the same rules should apply to both, just that a person can be knowledgeable in more than one area.

Maybe instead of saying “graphic designers moving from a print team to a web team should stay graphic designers” the smarter thing to say is “if your graphic designer has the knowledge to move from print to web (or doing both which is more likely the case) they should be paid more for the additional skills they will be contributing”.

The web industry is one of the only industries going through this design process identity crisis. Take the physical product industry (whichever specific product you want to use as an example) – to say that a “product designer” is the one who designs the architecture of the product, researches the use and develops strategy, applies the visual styling *and* actually builds the object itself would sound ludicrous.

The same goes for architecture – perhaps one of the closer siblings to what we do on the web. The process of creating a building contains very defined, and separate, roles – architects who take requirements and use cases and craft a strategy for designing the experience, contractors who manage the interpretation of this design and oversee the process of translating a building strategy into bricks and mortar, and the actual workers themselves, who literally build the object.

See, in almost every other industry, it’s a foregone conclusion that the activity of design as it relates to strategy and use (what we in the web world refer to as ‘user experience design’), the activity of visual styling, and the activity of production are separate actions, performed by distinct and separate professionals.

To those who think that it’s wasteful and confusing to work at drawing these distinctions, consider the damage you’re doing to your own brand or specialty. A programmer who calls himself a “web designer” gives visual designers that call themselves a “web designer” a bad name.

While it may not be realistic to have these separate roles in-house, to blindly argue that no distinction should be made is to keep this industry in a perpetual state of immature development. We owe this industry more than defensive positions – we owe it to each other to work through what the roles are and to educate our clients as to the importance of it.

Oh, by the way, a small nitpick – the word you want in the second paragraph is “complement”, not compliment.

It all depends on how motivated the “print” designer is in becoming a “web” designer. If it’s their choice, they can be successful. “Usability, information architecture (IA), and user interface (UI) design” can be learned as long as the web designer knows that this is a whole different ballgame than the print world.

The way I see it, there may be a spectrum (with 5 “colors”):
1. Web Stylist – visual only
2. Web Designer – visual w/ some strategic
3. User Interface Designer – strategic, some architectural and visual
4. User Interface Architect – strategic w/ some architectural
5. Information Architect – architectural w/ some strategy