Coding is hard enough. The last projects required design from scratch, so I did it (and people even kind of liked it, "clean and functional" ;) - but it's not my first love. So I'm a semi-hybrid.

On the other hand, I used to have a hard time finding graphic designers, who can think about usability and elegance and can actually implement the thing in a great and maintainable way. Would welcome these hybrids, really.

(And a last bit: One of the nicer designs I dealt with directly was imagined and implemented by a perl hacker, hehe.)