[orthoganol]

I think the factory-style production of prototypes is causing real effects in terms of the importance of design, just in order to not get brushed off.

There are just so many decent looking projects being posted to Product Hunt every day, and even traditionally crappy-looking mainstream sites like Paypal, GoDaddy, or ESPN actually look decent these days. I just can't imagine a successful new startup that doesn't have solid design people... Not just back end devs who 'have an eye for design', but devs who can fire up a vector tool and make custom graphics if they need it.

[meric]

Or use a sales team. Our company had a brilliant sales team who managed to sell a good product with a horrible looking and unusable website by directly setting up face to face meetings with clients for a sale.