What is a good designer?
“What is a good designer?”
This is a question I hear often from founders. And it’s a good one.
When thinking of design, most people focus on the visuals. This makes sense because it’s what they can immediately see.
But they aren’t aware of design’s more substantive impact. Much of a designer’s most important work is actually done behind the scenes. And it starts long before anyone opens Figma.
So let’s demystify this.
The three foundational skills of good designers are:
Product Thinking
User Experience
Visual Design
Product Thinking is clarifying what you are building, for whom, and why.
It’s understanding the goals of the product, the audience you are building for, and connecting the dots in between. A good designer can crystalize these into key use cases (the tasks people will do with your product) and ensure you’re building something that is compelling and valuable.
User Experience is shaping the product so that it feels natural for people.
A well designed app feels intuitive and simple. Good designers structure the product so that content and tasks are logically grouped, making it easy for people to navigate, and straightforward to add new features over time. They make sure it’s easy for people to find key use cases and seamlessly flow through tasks.
Visual Design is crafting the product to feel crisp, polished, and high quality.
This is what people see first, so is often the part of design that people think of as “design.” Visual design is all the pixels on the screen — the fonts, colors, buttons, spacing, alignment, etc. A good designer produces polished design elements that are cohesive and consistent. Together, these drive the product’s brand and connect with the intended audience.
You can think of the above skills as a designer’s “hard” or “technical” skills.
The softer skills around how they work are equally important. A good designer will pull their technical skills together and execute well. They will also collaborate well with other team members. So you should add these two skills to your list:
Execution is how a designer brings ideas to life.
A good designer is highly creative — exploring multiple, novel solutions. They are also analytical, weighing trade offs of various solutions against product goals and technical constraints. Good designers move seamlessly from conceptual idea to implementable designs. They don’t just assume the best case, but also design for edge cases and error states. They gain conviction in optimal solutions, but remain flexible to adjusting direction.
Working style is how a designer operates.
Good designers are great collaborators with engineering, product, and data. Good design doesn’t happen in isolation. This means sharing design work, iterating, and brainstorming with their peers along the way. They are not focused on creating pretty designs in Figma. They are focused on nimbly designing products to ship into the world.
Essentially, a good designer does much more than create pretty pixels. A good designer can start with an ambiguous idea and shape it into a compelling, implementable product that feels second-nature to users.
So how do you hire a good designer?
In Design, we often refer to a mythical “design unicorn” — someone who can do all of the above quickly and well. But in reality, you will mostly likely need to make trade-offs. These should be personalized based on the strengths and gaps in your existing team.
More on that in the next newsletter!
I have spent the last 20+ years in design, as an early designer on Google Maps and Google Search, and as a design leader at YouTube and Facebook. I am currently a Design Partner at Electric Capital ($1B frontier tech venture fund), working with early stage founders.
I am enjoying sharing my past experiences and learnings — especially as we begin to shape the user experiences of multiple new technologies across AI + Crypto.
If there are any specific topics you’d like me to cover, I’d love to hear from you. Email me any comments or requests and I’ll try to get back to every reply!