I have a five person team and the fifth person, a front end developer, is a frickin' godsend. He has a design sense. He knocks out new designs and design changes in minutes whereas the rest of us take days to come up with crummy looking updates. My lesson in this: as you grow you'll find your team has holes that need patching. Go and patch them.
So many developers underestimate the need for good, quality visual design and aesthetics in their work. In my experience most non programmers evaluate something first on how it looks, and if it doesn't look good, they won't be interested in how well it actually works. Most programmers on the other hand seem first to be interested in how well it works, without taking into account the look and feel.
I'm surprised this isn't one of the main concepts that repeatedly gets mention on this site. We obsess over 'make something people want', but never drill down deeper. Good design can go a long way toward making people want something.
I'm willing to bet that mint.com got a fair amount of popularity (and memorability) because it was so nice to look at.
It really depends on the market and your positioning in the market. pg's startup didn't have awesome design, but it served a need that people had in a way that worked. "make something people want" doesn't have to mean "make something mass-marketable", though it frequently does.
Agree with this. The front-end developer position should include design as well (as all web designers should have strong HTML/CSS skills anyways to correctly do their job).
