A co-worker of mine is switching her career from user interface more into front-end development. She asked me: "From your Point-of-View, what should I focus on? Should I learn to code better, so I could work on both design and development? Or should I focus on finetuning the user interactions, animations, and things like those?"
Let's be frank: I'm a developer, I've always been a developer, and thus I have a developer's mindset. I can not talk too much about design, but I figured out, that I can talk about is what I see happening around. And from my Point-of-View, that is that designers are shifting more and more into prototyping in code and designing ready-to-be-used UI components.
I think that is a tremendously good way to go, because then co-operation with different disciplines increase, designers can more ensure that their designs are being used more correctly, and stuff doesn't need to be implemented "twice" in projects (eg. first in Illustrator, and then in code).
But just my opinion. Please don't trust me. Look what the big players are doing at this very moment, and decide by yourself:
- Learning Rails made me a better designer on Signal v. Noise by Basecamp
- On Design Tools and Processes by Viljami Salminen
- React for Designers by Fredrik Jensen
- "Instagram [...] designers regularly contribute React code with JSX" from the "Why did we build React?" page of the React documentation by Facebook
- A React renderer for Sketch.app by Jon Gold of AirBnB
I don't want to say where the responsibilities of one discipline should end and where those for another one should start. It's worth to note other opinions as well. Some people are very interested in pointing out that the main thing is communication between designers and disciplines, and not the total mixing of the skills:
So, decide yourself, if this makes any sense :)