If it means helping to define and grow the culture I can do my best work in. To work with people I admire and trust(and may even be around for the next thing).. that's better than most jobs anywhere and incentive enough to be honest. It just so happens I also love designing great products, but designing great places to work can be just as fulfilling.
Yogo brings up a good point. You can get solid work via referrals, craigslist and e-whatever-lance by rolling a few wordpress themes and customizing wordpress sites.
You may be underestimating the value of intermediate skills. While a large agency may not pay you as freelancer, you could easily get a roster of clients through referrals and good old fashion hustle on craigslist (which leads to more clients) I have plenty of experience making this work as developer... which is weird since I am not a developer. If I can do it by accident, I am sure you can do it on purpose.
I do, but that's because I am not a developer so a lot of the information on HN is novel and outside my usual knowledge base. That, and the designer digests available on the web are so dumbed down it's hard to stomach.
Like watching repeats of MythBusters, the designer news outlets are ostensibly for designers but it's more about disseminating easily digestible content.
1. Read the good books in print. While the web is a wonderful resource for developers, it is not the same for designers. Most of the tips and tricks complied on the web are of little value for actually learning design. Most of the articles out barely scratch the surface and are just SEO bait.
2. Look at the whole, not just the pieces. Yes you need modularity in the form of UI building blocks, but that comes later. The biggest difference between design and engineering is that design solves every problem at once first by considering the entire system and questioning the inputs and outputs. Engineering tends to break problems into atomic units so it can work on them serially. Good designers solve as many problems as possible in one solution. Those include visual design, usability and product marketing problems.
I hate to be so cryptic but think of it as starting to sketch out the negative the space around an object. Purposely being blind to the details until the form has appeared. It's not magic but it;s really not engineering.
3. Study, learn, appreciate and dabble in typography for print.
This is the detail part.
The web has not yet come of age in this department (but it's getting there fast). By way of typography you will also learn grid systems and a few other useful bits. Buy the Type Directors Club annual, but real font from real foundries and appreciate them. Learn illustrator and appreciate those vectors -- Its worth mentioning that I don't know any designers who use Photoshop for UX.
4. Recognize the mistakes of most developers starting out with design. They are very often the same. Here are a few things I see often repeated.
No white space (because how is white space efficient right?)
Lack of hierarchy (because everything is important)
I searched "front end" and separately "UI" and the graphs are staggering -- for those searches it's nothing but boom time. I would expect similar results for "python" or "ruby"
As a way to send information is email unsurpassed, however from the receivers perspective the signal to noise ratio quickly favors noise.. and by that time it is difficult to adjust.
The real failing is that the interaction paradigms for tuning the noise to signal ratio are extremely manual and difficult to verify if it has been adjusted or filtered properly once set.
I could be as easy as choosing who I care about, what I care about, and when I care about it.. but instead we are forced to set up smart filters, formulas etc and assume that we wont miss anything important.
Also, 5 clicks to unsubscribe is another kind of fail altogether that makes pruning the inbox time consuming and hardly worth the effort when compared to just letting the spam, coupon pepper your real communications. Wouldn't it be nice if email automatically park those offers on a side bar? ..along with the rest of the no-replies? Keeping the conversations and action items front and center.
I have been in similar situations with very distracted CEO's who just thought of everyones input as opinions, or content to digest. Big problem, but solvable if you get another engineer to help make cases with you and help mentor (without explicitly stating that as a goal of course) the other founders a bit on how to run a tech startup, as opposed to a marketing effort.
Here are 3 very common scenarios and likely outcomes.
Copy verbatim is really frowned up. Stealing an image outright is seriously frowned upon (you get served a DMCA notice or similar), same with well crafted and very specific CSS / HTML. (No one cares about layout however, steal all you want)
But what happens when you are inspired by someone else's work? Did you take something good and make it better! Great we love that; this form of appropriation is typically considered flattering. (you get featured in a blog)
Or
Did you take something that looks awesome and re-purpose it for something that it does not quite work for, and when stitched together the design fell apart? perhaps because it was refactored by the hands of someone inexperienced? thats when people get really mad and they start coming after you.
(You get made fun of in a blog if the changes or substantial enough to be called 30%)
Its worth a long conversation to be honest, this was the shortest unedited 2 cents I could post on the subject without reverting to well known cliches.
I'm thinking about teaching a class on this, if you want to be a guinea pig and give me some feedback on what you think are the most relevant parts of a designers oeuvre are, we could try it over coffee and look at some of the specific problems you are trying to tackle. [email protected]
I agree with the Split test, but also while you are at it, run some landing page test. However, that means you have to have alternatives to test, so get the visual design stuff right and have a few versions to test with a specific conversion event in mind that is not "buy" As of now the page elements are so incongruous it's just baffling.
Quick question: why is this a website? this seems like information I would want on my smartphone so I could have easy access on the go.
Here a couple of red flags to look out for.
They are looking to be a billion dollar company. This is another way of saying that they have giant egos and unrealistic exit plans. Find the people that know the topography of the exit landscape and how they fit into it.
Business Development personel without a product: For most startups, its just too early to have a BizDev person around, unless partnerships are critical to the success of product
The CEO can't code
They have 1 Jr level designer to feed 6 engineers
Everyone uses Windows, including dev-ops. (run away)
No need for that step, ask you designer to try this. In settings, make set all increments to pixels. Then set the grid to 1px X 1px (in some unobtrusive color) When creating a new doc, always go to view / (check) snap to grid / then whenever making a sprite simply put everything together, and draw a rectangle around it. With the rectangle still selected, make sure its height and width are in even pixels, and Go to object / artboards / convert to artboard. Hit save for web, and you are done! (hint, make sure strokes are always set to inside, or outside, and never centered, adobe defaults to center, so creating some reusable graphic styles can make this quicker)
I have created a special key command for convert to artboard, since I use it about 80 times a day. Also, its typically better to double click and enter height and width then to draw a rectangle to insure the dimensions are in absolute pixels.
Your best bet in my opinion is learning Fireworks, it easy to make vector wireframes, and is is meant for churning out web optimized assets. The 9 slicing is huge help when reusing buttons, modules etc. Plus, there are lots of great UI templates out there to get you started. I personally use illustrator, but would highly recommend Fireworks for you particular needs