

Ask HN: Should we hire a designer or try ourselves? - Protostome

Hi fellows. We're on the early stages of our startup, right now with a limited amount of resources that should be spent wisely. We think that the the look and feel of a website (or everything else, for that matter) has a great impact on the user's experience and designing it is one of the most important tasks we currently have.
One of us has some experience in HTML and CSS and can get more proficient in it if needed, but he is a software developer and not a designer... So we ask ourselves, if any of you ever been in that situation before, what did you do? did you try designing yourself with some templates/from scratch or hired a pro to do the work?<p>Thanks!
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highlander
I once made the mistake of asking a developer with some design skills to
produce a website design. Result: the design showed 'some design skills', but
it wasn't good enough. Hire a designer.

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dennisvdvliet
Yes you should. See sites like airbnb.com and theverge.com one of their USP is
their design/usability

What are you guys building?

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Protostome
Our startup is about a game construction platform built entirely on the web.
users will be able to create a certain type of game using an editor we supply
on our website and download it to a 'game player' on their mobile device, so
the site isn't just a HTML with some CSS, it's a serious application. We've
got most of the logic behind the scenes already figured out , but we don't
have the touch for doing design .. ;-)

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mdhayes
"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it
works." so yeah as dennisvdvliet pointed out design is very important to your
product.

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shpoonj
If you want your website, app, whatever to look like it was made by someone
who dedicates their time and energy to design, you'd better find someone who
meets that description.

