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Who do the Y Combinator companies go to for design?

36 points by mhidalgo ↗ HN
I have been curious about this for a while, many of the ycombinator companies have decent to great design/logos. Maybe all these companies are that talented to do both backend and frontend work but I doubt it. Where do you guys go for design work and what do you look for?

21 comments

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stillmotion
Not sure about YC, but it seems like a lot of my friend's startups I know of used Electric Pulp (http://electricpulp.com) to design/build their system.

Also hiring freelance designers is very cheap and easy to do.

PStamatiou
They (Electric Pulp) also did Truemors and Alltop, which I can't speak highly of for the amount it cost.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134252

amentele
Paul. Electric Pulp didn't charge to build Alltop. This is the second time I've seen you weigh in like this. And by "like this" I mean "in ignorance."
webwright
MOST of the teams in the current crop that I know of (ours included) have someone on the team who is a fair shake at design. Another way to say this is that "most startups don't have room for specialists".

If you want my opinion, design is not a "coat of paint" to be applied after the fact. User experience (UX) design should be baked into how you make your product.

michaelneale
"If you want my opinion, design is not a "coat of paint" to be applied after the fact. User experience (UX) design should be baked into how you make your product."

So true ! Since the web came along, design has been hijacked by graphic designers - "coat of paint" - whilst important, its really just one part of design (perhaps the easiest) - UX is sooo much more.

dcurtis
Reminds me of my favorite quotation:

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. -- STEVE JOBS

jonah
Very important point. That being said, it's not an one-or-the-other issue.

I can do 100% of my UX/UI design in OmniGraffle and then implement it as black boxes on a white page and have a well thought-out easy to use site.

On the other hand, there are so many "pretty" sites that are really hard to interact with.

So, both are important - It seems to me that in the "web 2.0" world a pretty design will get press and get people in the door, and good UX is what will keep people using your site.

symptic
I'm a designer myself and I lean towards very simple layouts focusing purely on the text/content and using it as the framework of the site, not shoving content into the framework. It tends to be better from a usability standpoint, SEO, and even aesthetically. Less is more.

This is probably my favorite article on the topic: http://informationarchitects.jp/the-web-is-all-about-typogra...

joergbattermann
you don't by any chance work with me on a new venture? Less -is- more and I need someone who can help me/us there ;)
symptic
Your name doesn't seem familiar, but I am open to new ventures if you'd like to contact me. My email is in my profile.
aneesh
Just FYI, I can't see your email in your profile. The "email" field is not public by default. You could put your email in the "about" field.
symptic
Thanks for the heads up.
jexe
We're not a YC startup, but we found a designer who doesn't typically do web sites -- he specialized in storefronts, t-shirts, skateboards.. In other words, someone who didn't have any predefined notion of what to do on the web, someone whose core skill is to get a message across in milliseconds and to draw people in.

It worked out really, really well for us; it may be worth your while to look outside typical web designers. That said, we already knew what the application flow would be like, so it was a matter of 'skinning' for us -- color scheme, iconography, etc.

rms
I'm curious to see your design, are you ok posting your URL here?
jexe
Sure: http://outalot.com

Incidentally, we did get some proposals from other, more experienced web designers, but they all looked too formulaic and, er, web-site-ey.

dkokelley may have some good points, too.. It could've gone very wrong, especially if our site interaction was much more complicated (and surely someone else will think our design is a train wreck anyway ;) ), but I'm very glad that we took a chance on it.

In the end, the key was really that we were all just seeing the vision of what we wanted the same way.

And the site's artwork was designed by: http://nish.net

dkokelley
I congratulate you for finding a non-web designer who was able to get the job done well for you.

In my experience traditional print designers generally do not do a good job of creating a website design. They don't understand the deal with background images or what is and isn't possible, they prefer to use nonstandard fonts (easily fixed) and they typically don't understand what is and isn't possible with the technology being used.

Here's an example of what a print designer came up with for a website for a client of mine: http://cocunderground.com/fpt.jpg

The original designs looked best in my opinion, but the final (read, compromised) version can be seen at http://freepromotips.com