What designers do

 

• have a good design sense and understand the fundamentals of design principles.
• are good typographers.
• know all the major design software including the entire Adobe Creative Suite.
• know HTML, CSS, jquery, Ajax and JavaScript.
• know enough about server-side languages (PHP, ASP, Ruby, Python, etc) to understand how they work, what they do, and the possibilities of their use.
• know about servers, hosting, domain registrants, DNS, etc. Can set them up and fix them when they break.
• are up to date on social media and relationship marketing.
• are good at logic and deduction.
• are good at user experience and user testing.
• are SEO experts.
• know about and how to handle web accessibility (and the laws surrounding it).
• understand copyright laws.
• do progressive enhancement and graceful degradation techniques.
• are a personable, nice people who are good with clients.
• are quick to adapt to new software and new technologies.
• can train clients on the use of their websites.
• are good communicators.
• are team players.
• have good taste in art, music and movies.
• have college degrees in design-related fields.
• have a killer online portfolio.
• are well groomed, and wear fancy t-shirts.
• own very nice and expensive computers full of expensive software.
• are good photographers.
• can color correct photos and work in RAW.
• can cut clipping paths or otherwise extract objects from photos.
• have some basic video editing skills.
• can debug cross-browser problems and older browser bugs.
• can help clients with anything even vaguely computer-related.
• can be on-call at all times for emergencies.
• know OS X really well (and enough Windows to get by) or know Windows really well (and enough OS X to get by) and know a huge variety of utility software that goes with.
• can design for mobile devices.
• can train fellow employees.