How to find your first designer 🔍

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How to find your first designer 🔍<br>What we learned from over 300 portfolios in a discipline we don't practice

Andrew Mao and Bill Guo<br>Aug 03, 2026

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While building a startup, an invariable need is to constantly learn new things, then do them acceptably well on the first try. Among those things, hiring is a critical one to get right, and the learning curve is especially steep when hiring for or evaluating a discipline you’ve never encountered before.<br>Over the last couple of years we’ve engaged in several in-depth searches for designers, a role that was quite novel to us because our founding team, coming from our technical/scientific background, has little design expertise. After in-depth research and talking to many designers to understand what that world looks like, we wrote some notes to help anyone else who is looking to build out their design team for the first time. As a designer, you might also be interested in what it looks like from the other side.

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The design and designer landscape

In this process, we came to realize that design can encompass many different things: UX research, UX design, UI design, graphics, animation, branding, and other hybrid activities that are design + something else, e.g. many marketing activities. It’s important to get a sense of what skill set you most critically need at the moment when you say “I need a designer”.<br>The primary skills software startups seek out at an early stage are UX design (including research) and UI design. Roughly speaking, UX research/design = talking to users, understanding their needs, and figuring out what the product should do in order to meet that need — overlapping a lot with product work. UI design = making it look pretty, shepherding aesthetics, creating and scaling visual design systems. Our understanding from several sources is that it is rare to find both strong UX and UI skills in the same person , because they are quite different practices. Asking for “UX/UI designer” (often titled as “product designer”) is somewhat like asking for a “full-stack engineer”: a really good engineer that is truly in the top 1% up and down the stack is a unicorn.<br>When considering designers to add to your team, you’ll run into the following options:<br>A high-energy, smart, young, full-time employee (“hire for potential, not experience”) — less experienced but more affordable

An experienced IC, possibly part-time / freelance

An experienced leader, possibly part-time

A design agency, usually on a project/phased basis. If you’ve raised VC and want to get a lot of good quality design work of various types done in a short amount of time, your best bet is to throw money at an agency.1 But this has its downsides; see below.

No designer at all but relying on AI, which is increasingly becoming a viable option at the early stage.

While for technical hires betting on a high-talent, early-career employee can pay off, and contract agencies (dev shops) can be more hit or miss, for designers the calculus changes. That’s because:<br>It is hard to identify what makes a designer “good” early in their career when you aren’t a designer yourself.

Early-career designers tend to be stronger in UI (aesthetics) than UX (product/functionality), the latter of which comes with experience.2 Specifically, it’s easier to gauge aesthetic or visual taste from their portfolio, but trickier to evaluate product/user sense or ability to work in a team.

It’ll take significant effort to find strong UX and UI skills in the same hire, because they are rare.

A common theme we heard is that designers prefer not to work alone, but rather in a team with other designers . It’s a role that often benefits from the ability to bounce ideas off others for creative feedback, rather than being independently siloed.

Designers also prefer to work on a variety of projects , which is more stimulating for creativity. For both this and the reason above, it’s more common to find designers in agencies or freelancing vs engineers.

As a result, you may find that more experienced designers to be worth the increased cost.<br>Evaluating designers

When you’re evaluating designers the first thing you will look at is their portfolio , a website showing off all the projects they’ve worked on. It’s like looking at someone’s projects on GitHub, but much more visual. Sometimes you might see an amazing, beautiful portfolio, but keep in mind that each project was probably done with several other designers. Even if the work looks fantastic, you’ll need to understand what their contribution was to each project; a portfolio may be showcasing work largely done by others.<br>Beyond portfolio work, it’s critical to understand a designer’s ability to think, their product sense, and their collaboration skills — and the best way to do this is to dig deep into their work and ask lots of questions (as with any role). Many of the designers we met were...