A related pitfall is insisting on hiring the absolute best designers. If your startup is only a couple months old, what makes you think an established designer will put their freelancing or agency career on hold to join you on your wild adventure?
same for engineers. roll through the YC startup list, probably half of them are a business model and a rails app.
but you know what? it doesn't matter if they want to say they want the best engineers in their job post. They will attract the type of people they need. We've all heard "A hires A and B hires C", and, well, a twenty something hacker probably isn't trying to attract someone better than him, because, then, why isn't the new hire the CTO?
Engineers and designers exist on a spectrum of value. The businesses that need the best, run by the best, know how to attract the best. The ones that are solving less hard technical problems (but maybe really interesting business problems), they say they only hire the best, but they don't actually need the very best, and this isn't a bad thing. This is all self-evident, and yet people somehow continue to match themselves with the right opportunities, so who the hell cares.
Another issue that I've personally run across is negotiating how much control a (non-founding) designer has over the product.
In an early stage startup, it makes sense that one of the founders will run the product side of the company. But really good designers often want to have a good amount of control over the product, knowing that putting a glossy coating on a product with bad UX is a losing proposition.
This often means getting more involved in product research/strategy/prioritization process. This can be problematic, since non-founding designers are often hired mostly for their UI design/front-end implementation skills.
My feeling is that very good designers are ideally suited to taking a larger role in running the product side of the company. If startups are willing to offer this, I think they can lure more good designers to their company.
Personally, this is the position I'm in. I'm an experienced designer, looking for an early stage startup to work with. Many founders I speak with are hesitant when I say that I'm interested in working on the big picture vision for the product. I'm still looking for the right fit in this regard.
I agree with you entirely about the extent to which design is integral. I don't think design and making are effectively separable activities in software, especially at a startup.
But I think that doesn't mesh well with what a lot of people who identify as designers see as their role. From your portfolio you clearly don't fit the stereotype I'm describing, but a lot of self-identified designers (especially those with an agency background) want a lot of power to control others, rather than direct ability to create themselves. That is, they define "design" as something separate from coding, shipping, supporting, and studying the usage of a product.
That kind of hands-off approach to design won't work in a startup smaller that a dozen people or so; there just isn't enough of it to do. And even if there were, that sort of designer becomes a bottleneck, slowing iteration and reducing effectiveness. That's especially bad at small startups, because, as you say, at least one founder already believes they can do a lot of that work.
In your shoes, I'd look for a company where everybody is involved in product research, strategy, and prioritization. Sure, you'll do a lot of front end implementation to begin with, because that's what a startup needs. But if you also pick up some product tasks (e.g., organizing user tests, distilling site data into useful feature guidance, solving business problems via feature changes) I think you'll end up with the kind of involvement you want.
> In your shoes, I'd look for a company where everybody is involved in product research, strategy, and prioritization.
Speaking as one member of a three-person startup which is struggling to operate like this, I'm skeptical that such a company can work well. Three opinionated co-founders is a crowd; I can't imagine that having more would help. It might work in a case where there is a clear vision is which is shared by all members, but then the product development would already be more-or-less done.
There needs to be one founder or maybe two, who can lead the team by earning their trust. Loyal team-members will work like dogs; without that trust/loyalty (which again, needs to be bought or earned) you're herding cats.
The GP should find a compatible co-founder. With three co-founders (in our case at least), shipping a product is like stuffing three cats into one wrapped gift box.
I'm a big fan of the model of teamwork where everyone is welcome to offer their opinion on and spend a bit of time thinking about and working on any aspect of the product, but there are fairly clearly defined responsibilities regarding who has the final say on what goes to the final product. Or to put it other way, everyone is involved in everything, but each thing has only one person responsible for it.
Works for us, anyhow. We have a clear mission, but the vision of the product is constantly evolving. The CEO/head of product does have final authority, but we are all definitely involved, and I think it's a very collaborative process.
It helps that we work very incrementally and are very data driven. Every commit goes live after the unit tests pass, and we commit every few hours. We don't have to agree on everything, just the thing we're testing next.
I think there's a similar thing happening with designers that happened with engineers over the past several years, moving from a "idea guy" plus implementation engineers towards everyone looking for a technical co-founder.
It sounds like you should start your own company. I can't think of a situation where an early stage startup will want to hire someone to have a significant influence over the product strategy to the degree that it sounds like you're looking for.
I agree, anything that is designed with the intention of being used by people must unify functionality with visual appeal. The best way to do this is to have those creating it involved with both sides of development.
1) A lot of designers work at an agency at one point or another. The environment there encourages behavior very different than what startups need. E.g., long cycles vs rapid iteration, "final" deliverables vs incremental release, an emphasis on what clients want vs what users need, hopping from project to project vs really digging in on one thing, ability to specialize vs necessity of being an adequate generalist, high-church design vs getting one's hands dirty, and being hip vs being passionate.
2) One gets to be a really good designer by designing a lot of different things and keeping very current on trends. But startups require a long-term focus on a single product, which takes people out of the design game. That's a very hard sell.
At our startup we outsource individual pieces of design (e.g., logo creation, color and layout selection, coming up with a new look for something). But that ends up serving as raw material for the in-house activities. Most of the design ends up being done by the product manager, the engineers, or both collaboratively. That works for us because we do a lot of user testing and iterate frequently, and also because we know when to hand some piece of visual creation off to an expert.
Agree completely with the agency problem. There are far too many folk who confuse the agency model of doing design with the way design is done. It's one of the reasons that the Lean UX community of practice get some bad press in parts of the design community.
(Although the agency problem isn't really lack of iteration. Pretty much every design process is highly iterative. It's just that the agency folk do it by themselves and, usually, up front.)
I find the second point much less convincing. I know lots of folk who love doing long-term product work. I guess I see about the same short/long term work preferences as I do in the development community. You get to be a good designer by doing lots of design. As long as the in-house opportunity has that, you can attract designers if you're recruiting the right way.
From your last paragraph it sounds like you outsource most of the visual design work, and in-house things like interaction design, generative user research, user testing, etc.
That works well for some products (I'm guessing that what you're building is a B2B or B2C web or desktop app that uses a "normal" UI without unique interaction models, and with a market that isn't design focussed - but I could, of course, be way wrong there).
Other kinds of products really need in-house visual design skills - because not having them gets in the way of that rapid iteration that you so correctly identify as being essential (games, some kinds of mobile apps, products with custom interaction models, markets that are design focussed, etc.)
I agree that the agency design process is internally iterative. But they don't ship or observe actual usage, so I can't call it real iteration, which I think requires a closed feedback loop.
I agree that there are a lot of people who love doing long-term product work. But I think to be amazing at a particular sort of design, you have to do a substantial variety of it. I don't think most startups offer anything close to the variety that an agency or a freelance career can provide. Which is why we turned to external specialists for things like our logo.
I agree entirely that about different contexts needing different skills in house.
Hi William! (guess who didn't look too closely at your username before :-)
Well, depending on the agency, there is a closed loop with the user - it's just a pre-product closed loop built around interviews and prototypes. But I generally agree that the agency model sucks quite badly for product development in startups (and a whole bunch of other things too come to that.)
I don't believe that's a closed loop. The purpose of commercial products is to sustainably deliver value to purchasers. Until that is achieved, the feedback loop is open.
There could be some design firms that actually go that far, but I've never heard of a project like that. I do agree it's better when design shops attempt to test their design hypotheses through prototypes and user testing, as that does leaven the dreams with a dose of reality. We do a bunch of that for exactly that reason. But we never mistake a successful user test for actual success.
Obviously product based feedback is "better" on some levels, but it can get in the way of learning the answer to some questions quickly I'd much rather just get the answer quickly ;-)
As I play with experiment/hypothesis model I'm more convinced that increments-of-learning rather than increments-of-product help me more - at the early stages anyway. Since many of the folk I talk to seem to be really bad at validating business questions via early customer contact I think there's an opportunity for external folk to come in and help.
I'm really interested to see what agencies like Proof (http://proof-nyc.com/) organise themselves and their work with clients. I know my relationship with some clients is more like design/UX coaching rather than more traditional agency type work.
/re your last point, that's exactly what we noticed. A lot of companies think they need a full-time designer, but they could get away with contracting one multiple times throughout the year, leading to a much happier designer who gets to work on multiple projects.
I think a big bonus of this approach is that forces developers to improve their design skills. I'll never be an amazing designer, but taking these external design suggestions and adapting them to our ever-changing context has been challenging but productive. Rote copying of PSDs stunts the growth.
This contributes to the problem the article illustrates. You outsource your design, as you put it the "logos, color and layout selection, or a new look for something," and then say that the PM and engineers wing the UI and UX?
So you outsource your design and art, and then don't even really have a resource, outsourced or not, for user experience.
Also, it's quite a shame that you're associated designers with being "hip and not passionate" and "specializing and not being an adequate generalist."
Imagine if your post was reversed, and described why design-based startups can't find good programmers. All the pejorative "this vs. that" statements you could write about a programmer and what their "environment encourages."
> Imagine if your post was reversed, and described why design-based startups can't find good programmers. All the pejorative "this vs. that" statements you could write about a programmer and what their "environment encourages."
I imagined it. And?
There are places where programmers are treated as commodity, and there are places where programmers are prized possessions, and same holds for design, business, sales or any other stream of work. If I feel that all I need is someone to do a $25 logo because basically I don't give a shit about the logo and code is what that matters, it's totally my prerogative. I am under no obligation to appease random people's sense of entitlement.
If you run a design shop or are one of those "idea guys" who need a code monkey to do the easy job of coding so that you can work on the hard parts, would I do it? Fuck no. But that doesn't mean there aren't people who would do it or you are wrong to have such expectations.
I don't know why people feel that the whole world owe them something, and complain about being prosecuted when their perceived debt isn't paid.
We don't "wing" the UI and the UX. We design it. We outsource specific, discrete pieces of other kinds of design that we aren't good at. My point there is that, as the article suggests, we aren't looking for a unicorn designer.
Also, take a deep breath and read what I wrote again. I didn't say that designers in general had those problems, just that the environment at agencies encourages those traits. I stand by that. Programmers who work in particular environments can also have problems adapting to startups, but this article isn't about hiring programmers.
Bullshit. The article offers a couple of anecdotes to support the argument. There are thousands of talented designers looking for work. The problem is a lot of startups are unwilling to invest in good creative. Good designers cost money. I'm a designer and get peppered with requests for work. However I get offered peanuts. One startup looking to compete with Flow was only willing to pay $1000 for a website design, another wanted a logo done for $60. If you're a startup and you believe in your product, back yourself and back good creative.
I think a big part of the problem is sites like 99designs and crowdspring that de-value the creative and design process to pennies on the dollar. These sites turn great artists into sweatshop workers.
You're right on. I lost count of how many times clients ask me for Apple quality design without the intention of paying me for the time to come up with a polished design.
As briefly mentioned in the article, all startups want "unicorn designers". A person who is good at Visual Design, Front end skills, Interaction Design, Content Strategy, Usability, A/B Testing etc. is very very rare. And recruiting that peson for your startup is impossible unless your startup is awesome like Dropbox or Instagram. It'd be better if founders look for any two of the aforementioned skills and let the person grow in that role. There are lot of designers in the valley but everyone is looking for "unicorn designers"
Yep, very true and very insightful. But you can't tell these people to hire someone with talent and help them grow into the role. Startups have imbibed the unicorn philosophy that they must have a multitasking design "rockstar" or "ninja" and they won't accept anything less. Then they wonder why the job has been open for half a year and they can't find a designer that "fits."
Exactly. And such job postings also create negative effect. I'm a designer/engineer hybrid and some of my designer friends cringe when they see "we want unicorn designer who can manage everything" postings. Because:
1.It shows founding team has no design experience, which means designer's voice can be undermined (which is the major gripe for lot of designers)
2. Founding team has no clue about what they want to do on product design
As saying goes, if you are not technical then god help you to hire rockstars engineers on your startup. Same can be said, if your founding team lacks design talent/experience then it will be hard for you to hire ninja designer.
Tip: Ask your designer friends to help you out with hiring other designers if you lack design talent in founding team. From wording of your job posting to portfolio reviews.
I think designers prefer to work on many sites a year, especially the good ones and that's how they got so good. Having a full time job working on one site, doesn't really suit that - for example how many times you can redesign the website before you annoy the users? (Imagine being the designer for Gmail for example)
Programmers are much more comfortable working on one project for a long time, since it's actually easier and you get deeper into the coding problems.
On the contrary, it can be a lot more gratifying for a designer to be deeply involved in a product's design and make a long-term vision come to life. Gmail is not a good example since it's a fairly mature product, but I'm pretty sure a designer will never run out of things to do at most startups.
I'm a 100% creative type. I used to be a visual designer, and now I focus on UX design with visuals taking a secondary role. As just the type of designer they are describing, Don Draper on Mad Men summed it up:
"[...]we’re the least important, most important thing there is.”
Traditionally, design (and user experience) is the last thing to be added, and the first thing to be cut. If you have 2 founders, a business guy, and a engineer, you can make a product. No design required. But a designer and a business guy? They can make a prototype, but nothing functional.
And we live in a world (the startup, internet world) where function always supersedes form. For every 1 site with good design and bad functionality, there are 50 with bad design and good functionality.
It just so happens that a great many startups are started by technical people. And typically, they can develop a working product, or very advanced prototype, with no designer help at all. And when you add in the "inmates are running the asylum" mentality, most technical founders and engineers don't notice/care if their design (ux, ui, graphic arts) aren't superb because that's just "lipstick and lace."
There are a lot of engineers and technical founders that realize this isn't the case, but they are in the minority.
Great, thanks. Have they thought about hiring themselves to make the site friendlier to mobile browsers? If you know them, could you tell them please? I already did, but i guess coming from you the signal would be stronger. I had a hard time browsing on my phone.
You overstate your case quite a bit. There are a lot of products for which great visual design or very-well tuned usability are, frankly, not necessary for market success. Consider, for example, this very site. Some startups do indeed need great design, though.
Even for those startups where design is crucial, I think I'd only go as far as saying that the founding team needs someone with a strong design sense and some specific design skill. But that person needs to be a lot more than a designer.
Consider Chad Hurley, for example. YouTube beat out many competitors partly because of a much more usable design. But Hurley was also CEO and head of product, and he handed off the details of design early on to others. Even years later he still reviewed all the new features before they went live, but that's much more about his ability to evaluate design (and design's impact on metrics, which YouTube used heavily) than it is about being a designer.
Design evaluation and quantitative analysis based on analytics are part of what designers do to validate design decisions (identifying bottlenecks in task-driven applications, optimizing Ui and user flows to increase conversion rates, etc). These techniques are part of a beta or post-launch iterative design process.
Your point about Hurley having entrepreneurial skills above his particular profession applies to technical founders as well (or any founder for that matter), not just designers. Unless you think that just by having the skills to do programming at early stages of a startup can alone make for a good founder in the long run.
Even for products that don't have an UI at all there are many aspects of the customer experience that will require conscious design efforts to give you a competitive edge. A designer perspective can bring creative and fresh solutions to many types of business challenges due to overlaps with Marketing and business strategy. Integrating behavioral economics principles to your business through design can have a huge impact on marketing and sales regardless of what your product or service is about.
Design DOES mean business, and the fact that it is recognized more every day is a prove of that. I would have Ives as my cofounder and not just because he can design great products, but because he can design a great company. He also has an amazing networking, I bet.
This myope perspective about design is probably the main reason why companies and startups can't get experienced designers to join.
I believe everybody at a startup should think and care a lot about design, so I think we mostly agree.
I would like "designer" to mean what you say it means, but I think a relatively small fraction of people who identify as designers can actually do what you describe.
My point about Hurley wasn't that he had entrepreneurial skills on top of design skills. My point was that even for a billion-dollar success for which usability was a major success factor, it wasn't his visual design skills that made the difference: it was that he valued usability and had the ability to evaluate usability impacts. It is true that some designers have that, but one does not have to be a designer to have those skills.
I think you are right, we mostly agree on this. It is just the way you refer to visual design and usability evaluation what was confusing me. They both come with the design endeavor, but being able to evaluate its impact and to execute based on this is not exclusive to designers. Thanks for the clarification.
This is where I think design is misunderstood. The minimalist design of this site is likely a huge component of keeping the debate at the level that it is. In my book, that is great design - not creating an eye pleasing knockoff of a 37Signals landing page.
I'm not sure I'd agree the design is great, especially along the axes I mentioned, but it's certainly solid, and adequate for the purpose and audience. Either way, though, I think we agree that one does not need to have Jonathan Ive as a co-founder to build something like this, which was my main point.
If you want to increase your chances of finding a designer for your startup, you should
* Hang out on designer sites like http://dribbble.com or http://behance.com, not just Hacker News.
* Stop looking for someone that can do logos, web design, UI design, and even code HTML/CSS and JavaScript on top of that.
* Consider hiring someone with less experience and letting them learn on the job.
* Don't limit your search to the US, there are tons of great designers abroad too.
* Look at hiring a freelancer if a full-time position is too hard to fill.
"There's no shortage of smart, hardworking [designers]. There's a shortage of smart, hardworking [designers] willing to work for very little money." ~ paraphrased from David "Pardo" Keppel
If you're having trouble hiring, it's probably because you're not paying enough. It turns out that talented people are worth paying a lot for.
I think "design" is a vague term here.
What most people think of as design is "making it pretty" or designing individual graphical elements such as logos etc.
What a startup really needs is somebody who can make their app "feel" right,;i.e be easy to use, accessible , press all the right emotional buttons and have an attractive visual style that fits the app.
In my experience most of the people I have encountered in design, even in web design are the former rather than the latter.
We were looking for a designer to redesign a website some time ago and had one highly recommended.
I was optimistic until I looked at her portfolio. Entirely Flash websites serving upwards of 10MB to get the first page down, animation everywhere , all text was images , "mystery meat" navigation , no SEO whatsoever etc etc.
Now no doubt she was a very talented and skilled artist, but obviously somebody who held high end visuals as a priority above everything. I knew at that point that I categorically could not work with someone like that. She could probably have designed some nice logos, buttons and other things for us but I could not hand direction of an entire website over to someone like that.
On the other hands, I can't draw for shit or even choose good colors but I have been using computer applications for long enough to have some idea as to what UI elements should be included, where they should be placed. How to logically organize a UI etc but I wouldn't call myself a "designer" but I think these are skills that are essential to web app designers.
I feel that the main issue is that "Designers" that are great at design, often are pretty difficult to work into the dev processes of a bootstrapped startup, without slowing things down. Therefore design gets prioritized lower than features and this has an undesirable outcome for everyone.
A great designer (for an early stage company of 1-2 people) should be able to turn a PSD into HTML/CSS and work with tools like smarty templates.
Its just my two cents, and the requirement certainly changes over time...but in the early days, the most useful thing a startup could get us someone that can easily integrate with the dev process.
We think it's one of the easiest and most effective ways of putting your story out in front of some of the most connected designers in the Bay Area. email me at hang@bumblebeelabs.com if you're interested in sponsorship.
The biggest problem I see with startups searching for designers is that many fundamentally misunderstand what design is all about. They see the job of folk with design/UX skills as simply making there product pretty. A nice logo, some good icons, etc.
Design/UX, like development, is a far deeper domain than that. Design/UX, like development, will significantly affect the business/product. Far too often I see recruitment for roles that are exploiting only a small subset of a good designers skill set - and those are naturally going to be hard positions to fill.
There are strong parallels to the issues non-technical founders have recruiting developers - when what they really need is a technical co-founder / CTO type role.
At some point, when you're just as popular as him, you will get away with having a personal page looking whichever way you want it to be. Also, it's quote possible that he's just too busy doing other work and home page isn't a priority.
Because Hipmunk has been successful by mainly innovating on UI and UX in a very competitive category with strong established players. Although they also have some cool technology powering all this.
Because the author of the article has done freelance work for Hipmunk (as well as MileWise, Bushido, and Sharypic - listed at the bottom of the article). I like Hipmunk, but the mention is nothing more than self promotion.
Honestly, the problem is not finding a designer, but a good designer. And that leads to the larger problem: expectations are too high by those looking. They are expecting apple quality polish on a small budget. Good design isn't cheap. Good designers are hard to find because they are working on quality products, not your dinky startup app with a budget of 50,000 a year for a designer.
I will also add that as a designer and front end developer, its not that I am not interested in startups, it's that I either needs to be a larger part of the ownership, or payed what I am worth.
Even startups with a sizable budget can have a hard time finding designers. It's not just a question of money, but also knowing where to look and what kind of profile to look for.
Of course, the same is true for developers, but I feel that due to the recent focus on design's importance for startups, the problem might become even more present for design than development.
It's the same way for developer you can't find a good developers for the same reason. You need to find both developers and designers who are willing to sacrifice. It's to find designer or developer who want to become startup founders who don't already have ideas to sacrifice for yours. I would say for a designing more so than development freelancing maybe your best option. I would freelance out development because for non-technicals it's hard to tell the difference between good and bad development. Plus looking for a designer it more of a preference based on past work where developers past work might look good and be bad or vice versa.
The following is just how I personally work and see UX+UI+Graphic Design. Mine is just 1 of many viewpoints.
It's complicated:
1) Grouping all designers together and assuming we're all good at design, graphics, ui, ux, and info architecture is like grouping all programmers together and assuming they're all good at php, C++, java, ruby, mysql, oracle, javascript, visual basic, python, and perl. See what I mean. When you want a designer, you need to understand WHICH type of designer do you want. The same way you need to know what kind of programmer you need. In many elements of design such as Typography, layout, logos, branding, color, information architecture, visual graphics, user experience, and interface design. Finding a designer that does ALL of these well is extremely difficult. And it may not be a good idea to hire them either. Would you want to hire someone that has a little experience in every commonly used programming language or someone who specializes very well in just 2?
(All designers have a few necessary overlapping skills and often can work together very well and smoothly if they stay out of each other's way)
- UX Designer - In charge of what the user "FEELS" and what the user will get out of the site. Sets up user experience guidelines, helps create, pull, or finalize all features, user stories, usability studies, navigation maps, wire-frames, prototypes, persona storyboards. If the UX designers does their job wrong the user can "feel" confused about the site or doubt its legitimacy or ability to solve the user's problem and within 5 seconds leave, never to return. So emotion and feeling is extremely important. The UX designer crafts the foundation of the site based on predicting what the target audience wants and how they expect the site to help them achieve it.
- UI Designer - In charge of "HOW" the user interacts with the site. Sets up user interface guidelines, eye flows, layouts, button and input controls, control over all visual elements and what they do and how they interact with the user and a lot of overlapping responsibilities with the UX designer.
- Graphics Designer - In charge of what the user "SEES". Branding, logos, company colors, typography and custom fonts, sets up color & visual guidelines (buttons, logos, etc...), frequently works with photos and vector illustrations, often photographers.
See how different designers can be? In general you want to start with the UX guy, then the UI and Graphics Designer. You can have all 3 in the room but I personally believe the UX designer should ALWAYS be the first in.
2) Chasing the mythical designer + coder + know-it-all. Some of us can do design very well and a bit of front end coding. Design (visual) and programming (logical + mathematical) are so different. All the good programmers I've seen are terrible with visual design and all the great graphics designers I know are bad programmers. This is for a reason. It's very rare that someone has acquired both talents.
3) Don't make your designer do ALL of your front end coding. Because that just wastes everyone's time and assumes your designer is an efficient javascrip / jquery / css + xhtml coder. I personally love to start with css+xhtml THEN photoshop if needed. But as soon as I hit heavy javascript coding I start sinking. I would love to be able to get my design done and pass it on to someone who can code up the javascript quicker and better than I can. In a startup environment where speed and iteration are crucial this is really important. Everyone specializes in something and does that something very well and very quickly. Rather than having only a few people try to do everything they're not good at and end up doing a mediocre job that took three times as long as it should have.
4) Your broad requirements make us feel insecure. I'm a user interface + user experience + information architecture type of designer. Color, graphics, logos, custom fonts are NOT my strength and I cannot in any way compete with graphics artists who specialize in areas. I can do front end coding but only to an extent. I can make really easy to use sites but I can't give them that color + icons + logo + custom fonts + graphics themeing that a graphics artist can. Likewise the web is showered with websites made by graphics artists who aren't good at ux + ui + info architecture. These websites look pretty, have great icons, colors, & buttons but the layouts and site architecture are horrendous which leads to the user experience being horrendous as well. So when you ask for a designer that can "make everything pretty" I immediately skip the job offer because I don't want to disappoint you. When a visual designer sees the job opening they'll send you their portfolio of pretty websites that have improper eye flow, and terrible ux and you'll decline hiring them. Had you taken out that "graphics designer" must-have-requirement I would have gladly spent hours chatting with you in person (never online) on the direction you can take.
5) Hire me (UX + UI + Info Architecture) BEFORE you've hired a general graphics designer (icons + colors + logo + custom fonts). Otherwise It's useless. It's like hiring a painter before you've got your drywall put up.
Long Story Short, many startups don't know what kind of designer they need. If they hire a UX+UI designer they need to do that at the very beginning, then after they've got their beta product/service tried and tested they should go for a really nice graphics designer to help them with branding and look and feel. If you do it the other way around you just end up wasting time, and cause a lot of frustration for both designers because they have to RE-do all their work when ironing out design conflicts.
A UX designer is someone that you need to hire at the very beginning. You would sit down with them for Hours and hours over the course of MANY days (so pick someone you can stand) with huge sheets of paper and will start drafting out what it is the site MUST do and what it must NOT do. Finalize requirements and features, list content required, intents, user stories, and a million other things. There will be a lot of compromises having to be made, and there will be a lot of back and forth decision making. You will talk with your UX designer more than any of the others.
A UI designer is focused on the users, not you. They'll be off doing usability and predictability studies and designing the interface that the users will be using to solve the problems that the UX designer outlined.
A Graphics Designer can telecommute more, and can be left alone, send you mockups and seek feedback and a/b testing from users. They'll take everything from the UX and UI designer and add emotional appeal using color, lines, graphics, imagery, and photography, typography, logos, & icons.
All 3 are very important. If just ->1<- of these designers does their job wrong your website will be off (which may or may not hurt you). Look at craigslist, it's visual design is horrendous but it's ease of use thanks to a decent UI made up for it. Unforunately there's lots of spam and other problems that is killing' it's user experience.
This silo-ed paradigm is one of the bigger issues the UX community keeps embracing and promoting. By exception of some applications design (branding and corporate identity), I think this silo-ed approach that UX offers is hurting the product design/development process.
The more silos and "roles" you add to a any process, the more efforts need to go into coordination (meetings) and documentation to keep things consistent and flowing. This impacts time-to-market and increases overall project cost. Also, it doesn't allow to react to changes effectively (if at all).
A designer should be educated in all the different disciplines involved in digital product design. Look at Architecture, Fashion or Industrial Design: they spend years getting training across multiple disciplines (aesthetics, semiotics, ergonomics, design theory, research, history of arts, project management, budgeting, etc) including technical disciplines as it applies to their careers (structural analysis, materials, construction techniques, functional and tangible prototyping, technical drafting, and other).
Everything you said is absolutely correct in theory but realistically flawed. Every designer wants to be disciplined and master all those roles, but that takes decades of experience. And to expect that type of person to come work for your startup is like expecting to seduce a senior programmer from Google to come join your startup.
To achieve those God-like design skills that include everything from being a good artist (which everyone is NOT) to creating good logos and understanding branding and identity (which is difficult to master) to front end coding including css+xhtml+javascript+jquery is ludicrous. You might as well ask that your designer do the back-end of the site, incorporate your company, and handle your taxes and bookkeeping. At some point people have to realize that we can't do it all. Designers that CAN do it all, are freelancing and getting paid a ton of more money doing interesting and different things every month /OR/ starting their own companies with their skills and getting paid a crap load more with 100% complete creative control and freedom. Why would they want to commit themselves to working at the same company working on the same problems?
Being "educated" in all disciplines is possible. I can correctly choose fonts, logos, icons and graphics. But I'm not specialized in producing those from scratch. To be specialized in that is a whole other career path that takes years to learn and master. Digital Art.
So yes I do eventually wish to become the senior designer that you described. And in 10-20 years I'm sure I'll acheive that level of understanding. But that's the problem. It'll take 10-20 years.
Also, I think your comparison using programming languages as a reference is a bit misleading (disclaimer: I am not a programmer, I am a designer). There are disciplines involved in software development that are agnostic of the programming language of choice and that developers are usually knowledgeable of (programming logic, testing, deployment, application architecture, etc).
You don't need to hire a programmer that specializes in programming models and then find another one that creates a data access layer for persistence in a db for a small project. Only UX folks seems to be able to pull this kind of thing off thanks to over-floated design processes from the agency mindset.
> If you’re looking for a designer who can come up with your identity, design your site, create UIs with great user experience for your web and mobile apps, and on top of that code his or her work in HTML/CSS (and why not throw in Javascript in the mix!), then I’m sorry to inform you that you’re hunting unicorns.
I can do all of that. And I can do it all really well. I don't normally toot my own horn, but this all just seems like part of the job. These are skills that I've acquired over 13 years (I'm only 23), and apparently the combination is more desirable/rare than I thought.
Here's the thing, though: I don't consider myself a 'designer'. I think the title is too limiting, because it doesn't encompass other skills (like coding). And while I would never call myself a 'designer', I could probably outperform 99% of the designers I've come across.
Some recent work:
http://grubwithus.com (if anything is ugly/weird here, we're heavily A/B testing right now)
Since your horn-tooting post will rightly get downvoted into illegibility, I wanted to extract the bit that I thought a useful contribution to the discussion:
> Here's the thing, though: I don't consider myself a 'designer'. I think the title is too limiting, because it doesn't encompass other skills (like coding).
same for engineers. roll through the YC startup list, probably half of them are a business model and a rails app.
but you know what? it doesn't matter if they want to say they want the best engineers in their job post. They will attract the type of people they need. We've all heard "A hires A and B hires C", and, well, a twenty something hacker probably isn't trying to attract someone better than him, because, then, why isn't the new hire the CTO?
Engineers and designers exist on a spectrum of value. The businesses that need the best, run by the best, know how to attract the best. The ones that are solving less hard technical problems (but maybe really interesting business problems), they say they only hire the best, but they don't actually need the very best, and this isn't a bad thing. This is all self-evident, and yet people somehow continue to match themselves with the right opportunities, so who the hell cares.
Let's all just stop writing about it, yeah?