It came as a shock when I realized that I no longer consider myself a web designer. I mean, I’ve been into graphic design my whole life, and in college I focused on web design. Over the last few years though, my interest has gradually shifted from design to production. I’m less interested in creating a design from scratch than I am in the process of building the site.

I blame this entirely on Jeffrey Zeldman. He managed to show me that under the surface of the seemingly simple world of HTML lurked the fascinating world of web standards and CSS. Like a gateway drug, a few hits of Zeldman led me to Eric Meyer, Douglas Bowman, Jon Hicks and Michael Heilemann. And once I got a taste of how sweet standards can be in the CSS Zen Garden, there was no turning back.

In high school, I dreamt of having enough money for a copy of Photoshop. The idea of working with layers and transparency, and just the sheer power of the program blew me away. Today, I get the same rush cracking open the stylesheet from a well-designed site in a text-editor. It’s the concept of semantics, web standards and separating style from content that excites me. Fixing a display bug in IE gets my juices flowing the same way that the layers pallet in photoshop used to.

The web design industry seems to have divided itself between designers and developers. Designers spend some time doing production, and so do programmers, but there doesn’t seem to be much room in the industry for pure production positions. In fact, there’s a surprising amount of snobbishness involved. Designers especially seem to view production as something that anyone can do, so there’s not much respect for it. Developers are closer to the code, and tend to have a better understanding of the complexities of modern production methods, but even they don’t seem to have much use for it.

What people appear to have trouble recognizing is that excellent production is not simple assembly that can be done by anyone. It requires as much talent as a designer, and as much obscure knowledge and training as a programmer. Production methods today are not as simple as they were five years ago, and the industry is grudgingly coming to accept that there’s a growing need for people who are focused on production methods. We need people who can translate photoshop designs into clean, standards-compliant XHTML and CSS, and we need people who can work with the programmers to help them apply designs to their programs.

Mitch Hedberg had a joke where he lamented that people in the entertainment industry would expect you to do things that were only barely related to what you know. “You’re a comedian, can you write? …You’re a chef, can you farm?”

The web industry is doing the same thing right now by expecting designers and developers to know production. There was a time when HTML was simple enough that it was reasonable to expect programmers to produce their own HTML code, or designers to use a program like Dreamweaver. This isn’t really possible with modern web production. It’s unreasonable to expect that a good designer or programmer would be up-to-date on web standards or CSS browser compatibility and hacks, let alone more complicated matters like accessibility.

Which is where I come in, and people like me. I’m a trained graphic designer, I understand the concepts involved in good design. I also know enough about programming to be dangerous. But at heart, I’m a producer. I’m passionate about web standards. I get excited about CSS tricks, and I spend my weekends reading technical explanations of the latest browser workarounds.

This realization has been a long time coming, and when it snapped into focus, it was a shock. But like any important revelation, it immediately felt right. So I’m not going to call myself a web designer anymore. From now on, I’m a web producer.