Web Application Designer Position - What should we be looking for?

I work for a small data management/warehousing company that also focuses heavily on web applications. We are looking to "beautify" our existing web apps into something along the lines of mint.com or sifterapp.com or any of the 37signals sites for example. We are a .Net shop so whatever framework used on the front end would need to play nice with a .net back end and also use asp.net.

My question is what skills should we be looking for and what is the proper title for a person that knows how to create very nice looking web applications like the ones I've mentioned? I think having some experience with photoshop is always necessary, but it seems like a lot of the design patterns can be done using css and/or other front end technologies, or am I off base here? Basically, what skills should we be looking for in a candidate if we are looking for them to have skills in creating beautiful web apps that are both very nice looking and also very usable and what is that position called? Web developer? Designer? UI Engineer? Web Experience Designer?

I am also aware of some UI oriented frameworks like YUI, is this something that we should be looking for in a candidate, experience with this? Is a likely candidate going to be someone with a graphic design/artist degree or will it be someone more programming oriented? Is this actually a task for 2 separate people, one doing the gra开发者_如何学运维phics and another doing the user experience/css layout? It just seems very confusing to figure out what exactly we should be looking for so the interviews have been rather hit and miss so far.

Thanks!

you need a Graphic Artist, a usability expert and a web developer.

it is rare/unlikely that you will find one person who excels at all three

the good news is that you'll only need the graphic artist and usability people short-term

I would look for a Javascript developer with experience in integrating with ASP.NET. You need to explicitly require experience with CSS layouts, Javascript, frameworks such as jQuery, Prototype, etc. I know a lot of people that are ASP.NET developers and think they are good web developers just because they can drop a few controls on a page and have no understanding of what is happening on the client-side. Also, make sure that they provide you a portfolio.

There are almost always 3 parts of a website:

1.) Design: The designer(s) is(are) planning the layout of the website, with the following in mind: - maximalization of usability - nice looking - using only needed components (no elements to "fill the void") 2.) Backend: The backend guy(s) is(are) working on the functionality of the server 3.) Frontend: The frontend guy(s) is(are) working on the frontend

The backend and frontend guy might be one person, but programmers are code writers (with no artistic inclination), designers are artists. If you put a designer to write code (for example CSS), he might not solve the problems well enough, the same is the situation if you put a programmer to make a design. In my opinion you should hire a designer (some designers work for a very low salary) and a programmer.

In my opinion nobody can honestly say that he/she is a good backend and frontend developer and a good designer in the same time. For example I'm a good backend guy, a decent frontend guy, but I'm not a designer.