Front End Engineers - We need you to make Grubwithus (YC W11) beautiful

Edit: Also, Grubwithus is looking for frontend engineers w/ strong design sense. We're a small team and wear many hats.

Funny, this came up during a discussion of "UX" design a while back, where a lot of programmers (myself included) expressed concern about an emerging field that sees itself as the "user representative", standing between the domain and the programmers.

But I appreciate the concern on the other side... "pretty this up" doesn't involve a designer at the stage they can make the biggest difference.

I thought the 37Signals approach in "getting real" was a good one - use the "Three Musketeers". You want one good programmer, one good designer, and one good go-between who can do both - though cross training where all team members are at least somewhat capable of contributing to each role.

In the messy world of startups, though, I have a feeling there's going to be a lot of "pretty this up" work. Programmers working with essentially no funding will start coding, and eventually they'll get to the point where they know their creation looks ugly. At this point, they'll come to you needing it to look better.

Try to see this as a challenge. Plenty of programmers have joined organizations as they guy who will "code this up" and managed to bring the team over to a better understanding of what they can do. This may be a crucial skill for designers as well.

Sounds to me like you're just being pretentious. Not that designers ever do that.

Frontend engineers execute beautiful designs. It's a team effort.

Also, Grubwithus is looking for frontend engineers w/ strong design sense. We're a small team and wear many hats.