I have been curious about this for a while, many of the ycombinator companies have decent to great design/logos. Maybe all these companies are that talented to do both backend and frontend work but I doubt it. Where do you guys go for design work and what do you look for?
MOST of the teams in the current crop that I know of (ours included) have someone on the team who is a fair shake at design. Another way to say this is that "most startups don't have room for specialists".<p>If you want my opinion, design is not a "coat of paint" to be applied after the fact. User experience (UX) design should be baked into how you make your product.
I'm a designer myself and I lean towards very simple layouts focusing purely on the text/content and using it as the framework of the site, not shoving content into the framework. It tends to be better from a usability standpoint, SEO, and even aesthetically. Less is more.<p>This is probably my favorite article on the topic:
<a href="http://informationarchitects.jp/the-web-is-all-about-typography-period/" rel="nofollow">http://informationarchitects.jp/the-web-is-all-about-typogra...</a>
We're not a YC startup, but we found a designer who doesn't typically do web sites -- he specialized in storefronts, t-shirts, skateboards.. In other words, someone who didn't have any predefined notion of what to do on the web, someone whose core skill is to get a message across in milliseconds and to draw people in.<p>It worked out really, really well for us; it may be worth your while to look outside typical web designers. That said, we already knew what the application flow would be like, so it was a matter of 'skinning' for us -- color scheme, iconography, etc.
Not sure about YC, but it seems like a lot of my friend's startups I know of used Electric Pulp (<a href="http://electricpulp.com" rel="nofollow">http://electricpulp.com</a>) to design/build their system.<p>Also hiring freelance designers is very cheap and easy to do.
<a href="http://www.zeitstudios.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.zeitstudios.com</a> does a good job adapting to the feel one's attempting to achieve. (I don't work there)