My view is that if you pick a designer with a style, you're gambling. I've seen an alarming increase in designers with styles over the past 10 years and I don't like it. It flies in the face of what I think a good designer should be and do. That is, they should be able to look at a project, any project and come up with the best design for that project.
If you're looking for graphic design, then find a designer whose graphic design you love. If you're looking for a UI design, then find a UI designer whose UI you love.
Poster designers are concerned with catching the public's eye and delivering the necessary information, but catching the public's eye is arguably more important. Other designers exclusively do branding, which is all about 'look' and hardly about 'function'.
In reply to the original point, I would say that, on one hand, how something looks is part of how it works, if you consider the entire user experience as the function of the product.
On the other hand, I think what you're saying is that you're reluctant to hire designers who only do a particular style well. I agree that a good designer should aspire to broaden their pallet, but I see no reason to condemn those who for whatever reason are not capable of or interested in that.
For comparison, consider that some fine arts produce work in the same style for their entire career (i.e. James Turrell) while others explore a broad territory (i.e. Gerhard Richter).
I'm sure good coders can do just that (just like good designers can be flexible), but it still seems counter-productive not to aim for the best possible match first.
The article doesn't at any point mention what kind of designer they're attempting to hire. It seems they were looking for some combination of graphic, brand, interface, and... probably a few others. I don't think they were looking for a product or experience designer, but it's not entirely clear.
Design is often a failed effort at organizations, especially those with broad aspirations and significant size, because it must deliver collateral, interactions, and experiences that are emotional, consistent, powerful, scalable, and understandable while communicating brand.
This is hard, and made harder if you can't describe or define the design work you need to execute across all its surfaces.
Hacker News comments & articles generally draw a single line between aesthetic and interaction design, with a tenuous acknowledgement that uniting multiple interactions in a consistent, comprehensible manner is a distinct discipline.
Companies will continue having difficulty hiring appropriate designers until designers better define the work they do and value they add.
But hiring a UX designer is a completely different process, which needs to show their deep, deep understanding of product, user stories, etc.
And too many companies think that graphic designers are UX designers too. It's very rare to find designers that do both really well. And this article doesn't even mention the distinction.
Folyo (http://folyo.me) was also a great resource that helped us find our designer Paddy (http://lefft.com).
This concept extends beyond design -- you want anyone you work with to be someone you trust to do their job.
Read this ^ , clicked the link and didn't really like the site. It's just... boring, from the palette to the layout, to @font-face of choice looking clumsy on Windows, to the logo, to the illustration and icons style. I don't mean to sound like an ass, but that's not a design that grabs attention and prompts to stay and explore. Perhaps it's an improvement over what they had originally, but that's not very good either.
Little did I know, his expertise was in building ambigrams, and we spent an entire round of drafting + feedback moving away from an ambigram concept. Everything worked out in the end, but the initial miscommunication was probably our own fault. We hadn't done our research, and we probably weren't the best of clients to begin with, as we had no idea what we really wanted and thought we were safe leaving the direction up to him (with hardly any input on our part).
So, ultimately, we trusted him more than we probably should have, given how little we actually examined his style and areas of expertise.
This is great advice for finding a designer. Dribble for a designer is like viewing a developers code in github. You gain insight into what they can do and what they like to do.
Since I work alone so often, I always assumed that other designers could do-it-all and mesh with any style the client wants but after a few years I'm starting to realize the opposite is true. Designers have their own unique style that they replicate over and over. We have certain theming and placement of elements that we stick with throughout numerous projects.
Perhaps showcasing our style is more important than showcasing clients in our portfolio? (which I badly need to update)
"Make sure you like the designer’s style so much that you would trust them to create a design for you without any input."
Right, just make sure they be stylin' yo!
