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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

Yes.

I'm a programmer by night / business type by day. I have a website soon to be released in beta and I hired a designer I trusted (and could afford) from a previous job. She worked wonders for the project -- seeing the new design also reinvigorated me.

A few tips: Hire a friend if possible (you'll probably get a friend-rate), if not work by referral. You want someone you can sit with face to face. Avoid 99Designs and the like if you can. Pay your invoices immediately and you'll find the designer will likely continue to be super helpful. Also, get an hourly rate up front since you'll probably find things that need to be adjusted. Lastly, I wouldn't use the designer for HTML, just have them hand off PSDs, the markup tends to be not so good. Insist on PSDs, not flattened images.

By the way, I'm happy to give a refferal for a trusted friend. Just email me at juliuss at gmail.

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Ditto on the PSD advice. There are plenty of PSD to HTML chop shops that will do a much better job slicing and creating standards compliant markup for your site.

It ends up costing a little more in the long run, but you also get a better quality product.

As a designer I would never hand over my designs to one of those chop shops. Any designer worth his salt can code his own designs. I don't trust the psd2html services to give me high-quality, semantic, robust markup and CSS.

You're probably more talented than you realize, but I wouldn't expect all designers to know html. I know a few designers that are amazing, but clueless with html. I think the skills are quite often mutually exclusive -- which is a good thing for you as the exception.

I've met a few talented web designers who don't grok html, javascript and css, but (so far) no product ux designers. Depending on the type of product you're building, someone like this may be exactly who you really need.

Working with a good ux designer will completely change your understanding of the role of design in product development. They can play a pivotal role in defining and shaping your product. And yes, a person with these qualities almost invariably can also code. Understanding the underpinning technologies of the web remains nearly inextricably entwined with understanding the design potential of the web.

As an aside, I think a platonic ideal founding team would have 2-3 people who share varying degrees of business, design and technical acumen. Each person has a defined role, but they also relate to their co-founders' roles in a meaningful way. Really understanding what it means to be GREAT at something often requires educating yourself enough to become mediocre at it. Completely partitioned specialization is for companies big enough to need HR departments.

On a whim I tried psd2html because I was under a crunch, and guess what? The quality of the markup was fantastic, so now I use them often.

I don't trust the psd2html services to give me high-quality, semantic, robust markup and CSS.

Umm...why not? You just said you'd never hand your stuff over to them, so what basis do you have for not trusting them?

I've personally had great results with several of them, much better than I've had with many designers.

I could not agree more with this. I don't know any designer that is any good that can't code too.

Web designers that can't code are just designers. So make sure you hire a web designer for your website and you will get a better result.

Making webdesign with Photoshop is old school, in my opinion. Modern webdesign is no more a mask to apply to your html, it's the entire front end side: you'll have to deal with markup, CSS and javascript.

Also, the majority of professional webdesigner out there are starting prototype with CSS.

Any reasons on why to avoid 99designs and ilk?

If you're looking for a logo or page that will fit in with your existing look and feel, those sites are pretty good. But for me personally, I got a lot more traction by being able to sit with the designer and really give them a sense for what I'm trying to accomplish. So, it really depends on what you need.

Because you are asking the designer to do all the work without the guarantee of getting paid. The result is that you get a crappy product, where as if you just bit the bullet and hired a designer you would get something that you could actually use.

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