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Comment by inklesspen | Hacker News Reader

Dead.

I need someone who knows his way around Photoshop, CSS, and visual design, and I don't have a couple years to drop everything and go learn that.

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Dude, it's nothing you can't learn in a few weeks, or maybe even one week. Get GIMP, read a tutorial, fool around with it for a while, and try online tutorials on how to make a web 2.0 button, say. That might take one, two days tops.

CSS isn't rocket science either. It's a variant of html (sort of) where you choose stuff like font and background color (style, I guess) in one master document that all the other web pages refer to. It's like the Slide Master in powerpoint. It has slightly different punctuation than html, but it's not that special. It's just an easier system, and it's probably overhyped by design bloggers.

Visual design: there's all kinds of "7 mistakes begginers make" type articles in hacker news. Some are better than others. Just use common sense, good taste, effort, and knowledge.

That should get you acquainted with all three problem areas. In fact, after a few weeks one can design clones of homepages of Yahoo, Google, YC, delicious, facebook, and so on. Of course, I don't know what level of mastery you're talking about, and there's definitely a lot of fancy things you can do with photoshop that take a lot of knowledge, but the kind of design chops one needs to do a startup aren't that hard to get.

GIMP is good, there's no doubt, but I've found that 90% of the graphical development for my project can be done in about an hour on Inkscape.

Good call on Inkscape - I have been looking for a decent Photoshop type app to run on OSX for ages. Finally got my next and back arrows drawn without starting up the windows box!

That's a silly reason for a startup to die. Design is rather unimportant to the success of a site. Heck, look at Craigslist, or News.yc.

My development and design are being outsourced. While that is taking place I am learning HTML and CSS so that I can understand certain things and tweak design.

I'm reading the Head First book on html and CSS. I didn't know anything before I started. It isn't hard to pick up. http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/hfhtmlcss/index.html

Why don't you just contract it out?

Put whatever crappy design you can make on it, and then take it to some of the big name designers, and see how things go? Even if they do it, a few bucks to them and I'm sure they'll post about it on their blog... they get thousands of readers.

You can outsource design work to students and foreign workers for approximately US$2 per hour. Indeed, you're spoiled for forum that will bid for you work ( http://freelanceswitch.com/finding/the-monster-list-of-freel... , http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Employment_and_Wor... ).

However, if the functionality of your app will be greatly expanded then it may also require changes to your CSS. Alternatively, you can skip a large amount of design. People don't access your website to see its innovative style. They access your website to get useful information.

design is important ..but not something that will take more than a week to figure out ...i think the only thing that you need is to learn a bit of photoshop (2 days) and read the book "don't make me think"...heck you can even leave photoshop ..just read the book and that should be good enough

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