The danger can be that front-end developers, working in a user-focused area, are seen as performing a superficial function — applying a polish to the heavy lifting done by another developer, say, or that dread comment, “making things look nice”. Let’s be clear, making things look nice is the sole responsibility of the designer. When front-end developers spend much of their time deploying underlying data received from a backend database into their views, or pages, they might mistakenly be thought of as merely translators or interpreters, transferring a graphical image — the Photoshop-ed design — into markup and style rules, purveyors of what is sometimes almost mockingly referred to as a ‘black art’ of making pixels lay out correctly onscreen. While this perception is perhaps unfortunate, it is understandable. It is a particular problem where a development workflow is — some might say artificially — segregated into database infrastructure/domain modeling/server side workflows/front-end workflows. In smaller organisations a front-end developer has the opportunity, if she wishes, to input into any of these areas. In larger organisations, the increased granularity of functional areas means those opportunities are greatly reduced, and as you can see from the segregation model above, the front-end development work comes at the end of a long chain of events and decisions which essentially shape and restrict the front-end developer’s choices.
A very interesting article, written by Paul Carvill.