How to Hire a Great Web Designer

Garry Tan, designer-in-residence for YCombinator, shares some insights on how to hire Great Web Designers for your Startup/Company.

For startups on the Web, design is often a fundamental differentiator. It’s important to have a design leader in the company as early as possible – and he should be given say over schedules, deadlines and product strategy.

The one thing that really stood is how non-technical or non-designer managers should deal with designers. “There’s a reason why people should be managed by people who have done the work before – they have a clear way to evaluate talent and performance. My advice would be to ask a friend or colleague whom you trust to evaluate the output and determine if it comes to fairly qualitative measures of aesthetics, fitting your brand, etc.”

So, even if you got a good designer and a talented one, the one interacting with him or her have not clue of the design trends or at-least a common sense of what’s happening around the Internet, it will totally be counter-productive and harm the company brand and reputation.

The article is a good read – How to Hire a Great Web Designer, With YCombinator’s Garry Tan. And if you’re looking on enlisting at the directory of Designers mentioned in the article – Y Combinator Designer Directory.