I’ve been doing front-end as a freelancer for 15 years. I have some PHP background and still do some backend stuff to this day, but I specialized in converting design to code back when it was cool in the late 2000s and 2010s. And I’ve been doing this since then.

I’m pretty good at it, agencies usually come to me when they have a “high-stakes”, design-oriented project that their team can’t handle the challenge of making it pixel perfect and “flawlessly responsive”.

But these jobs are pretty much dead. The 20-page cutups became landing pages, but since I was making good money I failed to learn new stuff (React, Angular), mostly because I was more of a “visual frontend” guy. Now jobs are scarce and frontend listing are 70% React, 20% Angular and the rest is Vue and other things. I don’t even know how to look for a job as “visual” frontend developer as everything requires one of these frameworks now. I even looked at some PHP jobs, but they all also require some framework, mostly Laravel.

Any suggestions on how to proceed now? I’ve been studying some Vue.js since it seems a lot easier and could be a good starting point, but I really feel I’ve fallen behind at this point.