If you were a full stack JavaScript wizard AND you had solid design skills, you would be a unicorn with hooves made of diamond and a jet engine strapped on its ass.

Alas, my design skills stretch no further than the ability to vet designs created by others and giving decent suggestions.

I think this makes me more of a pony with an ice cream cone duct taped to its forehead.

Haha!

In seriousness, some tips that I find help:

* Learn & use Bootstrap. A manager actually told me to use Bootstrap instead of a custom webapp design created by his in-house designer once. The defaults are fine for a surprisingly wide range of projects.

* Learn some design basics, like the rule of thirds, typography and picking palettes from colour wheels.

* Don't be afraid to copy other people's designs. Conversely, if you're copying whatever is in fashion right now (I'm looking at you, long, scrolling pages split into sections of type/images...), then you might be better off just using Bootstrap.

Finally...

* Hire a designer.

I can do all that, so what am I?

A desingeneer.

Good news is: almost anyone can be a designer.

Seriously. Design is easy: 1) Typesetting. Just put the text where it should go. 2) Colored backgrounds! Everyone likes color. 3) Responsive. Make it look good on mobile as well as many resolutions (max-width the main content area, use a framework).

If that's honestly true, you're punching well above the majority of people who work in the industry, and you have a highly valuable skillset. Plus you come with free ice cream :)

And... question. Why don't you teach newbies and then you hire them?

That's a solid option if you have:

  * The money to pay a junior developer who won't be productive until they're trained (probably a few months).
  * The money to pay a more experienced developer to train someone rather than working on your app.
  * The wiggle room on your deadlines to be able to slow things down for training.
  * The stomach to live with the fact that an experienced developer may become available two weeks after you've hired a junior dev.

Depending on your requirements it could be the right call.

A bootstrapped startup is almost never going to have the capital to make this feasible, but a big company might.

Java developers are easy enough to find, so it rarely makes sense to spend months training someone. Ruby developers are a bit harder, and the training is almost mandatory if you're looking for Haskell developers.

That said, I would like to see big companies take a leadership role in this stuff. My company is always complaining about how hard it is to find qualified people. We've got the time and resources to run a bootcamp-style training course. We could bring in 30 people and train them for a few weeks and offer junior positions to the people who performed best. The people who were passed over still have valuable skills they can use to be hired by other companies.

Just seen this. Funny you should ask that, but I am actually working with somebody new to web development on a project right now as a sort of work experience thing. If you have a bit of time every day it's actually not that hard to teach somebody new. I highly recommend it!

Don't bother. I'm a front-end developer that happens to have a degree in design and no one from creative listens. Or they gripe about interrupting the "creative process" when I point out problems in the design intended for browsers before anything gets built. Telling them their "creative process" is just their opinion falls on deaf ears.

That sounds like a problem with your particular work environment, rather than a reason to not learn design

You're right. I'm just publicly griping.

This guys is being pretty hyperbolic when it comes to the requirements for design-related skills. Perhaps that is the bar they set at Cloudera, but here are a lot of people out there that do 'front-end development' who don't have corresponding design skills. There are also classes of people out there called 'designers' that are particularly suited to that line of work.

I believe I say in the article that if you have 5 of the 7 things that you're in solid shape. You certainly don't have to have any of these things, but having them helps...

/the author

Except if it is http://www.jsbin.com/ :)

But I feel exactly like you.