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Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

This is an extremely important point to understand.

Visual aesthetics is about optimizing not about fundamentally solving business problems.

Of course you need something that is not completely impossible to look at but obviously the world is filled with less than pleasing visual solutions on very successful businesses.

If you are dealing with designers as customers you obviously need to prioritize the visual aspect. And visual design can be used in saturated markets to become the preffered choice but it can also work against you.

All businesses must figure out to what extent design is important for their success not just assume that it will help.

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The point about visual aesthetics may be true, but that's only a part of what a graphic designer does: a good graphic designer will solve communication problems, and that is definitely a business problem worth solving well.

Yes but communication problems are primarily existing pre-sales and some people are very good at that.

Designing the actual interface/service/functionality/product is a different problem all together.

Maybe the term "communication problem" isn't the best. A better one might be usability, or interaction design. Good design has heaps of it. And it's not aesthetics alone. A designer should go a lot further - scope includes accesibility and (if you're unlucky enough to work with me) information architecture/design.

Knowing how a colour wheel works doesn't solve problems like a custom-designed, ticked-out über-awesome CSS -based drop-down list that doesn't respond to keypresses.

Knowing when to use search, and when to use tags, or how to group search results in a way that makes sense to the use context is worth paying a lot more for than just coming up with a cool UI concept.

TLDR - this blog post is bang on the bucks.

Yeah I think we agree.

The only point I am trying to make is that there are many many great webdesigners out there that can make beautiful websites that communicate well. But it it's often the same guys that design something like an interface or a mobile app.

The creative agency world is filled with people able to do artistically stunning websites but they are approaching it from a communication/advertising point of view where you might be exposed to the site once or twice. This is very different than doing something like say hipmunk.

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