Most important modern day skills every designer and developer should be aware of

What are they?

I’ve been out of this field for months yet again and trying to slowly creep back towards it. To my understanding, aside from HTML5 , CSS3 and jQuery, there is Responsive Design. How important is this? Should everyone know of it and how to implement it? What about frameworks? Boilerplate, Blueprint?

What do you guys recommend? What skills should a modern web designer possess today? What about web developers? Are they the same for the theming business vs client work?

Looking forward to hearing some insight from all of you. Thanks to everyone who participates.

A mobile devises are very common nowadays, so responsive design is important. http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/

Thanks.

Anyone else have anything to add?

Responsive is about 18 months old now, but a lot of people still have yet to get on board. It’s a great idea which I have used only a couple of times, because it can be tricky (complex designs are TOUGH ).

I use www.getskeleton.com to build sites on, though there are plenty of responsive grid systems out there.

matt5409 said
Responsive is about 18 months old now, but a lot of people still have yet to get on board. It’s a great idea which I have used only a couple of times, because it can be tricky (complex designs are TOUGH ). I use www.getskeleton.com to build sites on, though there are plenty of responsive grid systems out there.

Thanks so much.

Are people at a disadvantage if they cannot write raw javascript and only utilize frameworks such as jQuery and plugins? Or for front end development is it a requirement that a person knows JS in and out just as well as HTML and CSS ?