Leisa Reichelt calls herself a designer. Stowe Boyd calls himself a designer, too. Ryan Singer says he’s also a designer. Zeldman talks about design all the time.

I don’t mean to suggest for even a second that Leisa, Stowe, Ryan and Jeffrey aren’t designers. They’re just four people who, although they all work in the indernetz, do wildly different things. Talking and listening to them, and my discussion with Mathew Patterson the other day, got me thinking about how the folks who call themselves “designer” define what they do.

The web has exploded the concept of design. Once was the day that a designer was someone who made aesthetically pleasing things (that’s right, objects you could hold in your very own hands) which solved a problem. Sometimes the problem was a selling a new car, sometimes it was selling concert tickets, sometimes it was earning points for taste with your neighbours, and the list goes on and on. Although these are very different endeavours, all are called design, and there are also fancy, well-designed drawers for all of them: industrial design, graphic design, furniture design, and so on.

Now we’ve got “web design”, a drawer that’s full of folks who do funky stuff in photoshop, some who think and scribble, others who write HTML and CSS and quite a few mash-ups of the above.

Do you call yourself a designer? Think about design for a minute, and write a comment below and let me know:

• What do you do every day?
• How do you define “design”?
• What parts of what you do are essential to your definition of design?

The more answers, the more interesting the comparisons, so even you lurkers and off-chance one-time-only visitors are encouraged to chime in.