Some &#x27;pure&#x27; design jobs may be drying up but there is plenty of work in the front-end developer space. When work becomes thin designers should focus on Sharpening their JS skills and they will find plenty of work.<p>When someone is bemoaning the lack of work available I suspect the real problem is their inflexibility or technical stagnation. This is especially apparent when a novice roped in from the mail room can out-compete them and eat their lunch. The problem is the designer&#x27;s skillset, not the industry trend.<p>The following anecdote is from my perspective as a Sr. Programmer. I&#x27;ve worked with many great designers over the last 10 years and this is an example of my worst experience working with a &#x27;pure&#x27; one.<p>About 4 years ago I once worked with a designer who refused to break up a 60 meg psd file into separate elements I could use for buttons&#x2F;background etc. I don&#x27;t even have Photoshop. Her argument was she didn&#x27;t know which layers&#x2F;elements should be separated.  She gave this to me the day before I had to have the site in prod.  So I fired up gimp saw that it had 500 layers and just exported it to a jpg and used javascript imagemaps for the buttons just to get it out in time. This is after a week of work on another site they changed their mind on.  I ultimately didn&#x27;t get paid for any of my work and it was the last time I freelanced.<p>Primadonnas who do not put in any effort into learning basic technical skills to maximize their effectiveness can take a hike.<p>I&#x27;ve worked with great designers who were excited about the technical aspects of their craft. They understood that knowing what&#x27;s possible makes them a better designer. Even when their graphic design degree did not provide them with any CSS training they quickly adapted because nobody has time to pass something back and forth moving elements around a few pixels at a time. I&#x27;ve seen more than one end up as great front end programmers and UX&#x2F;UI designers. Even the ones who never quite got JS but embraced CSS were a great resource to have and made our sites look great.  These are the kinds of people who make projects fun.<p>If jobs for people who consider CSS &quot;beneath them&quot; are drying up I say good riddance. Nobody has time for the overhead entailed from having programmers move elements around back and forth a few pixels at a time to please the designer who can&#x27;t be bothered to learn valuable skills of their own trade.<p>The rule in technology has always been &quot;Adapt or Perish&quot; nobody bemoans the loss of COBOL jobs today for the same reasons people don&#x27;t know what a &quot;Printer&#x27;s devil&quot; is.