As a hacker/founder who has also taken up the art/design role, I disagree and think that developers who can draw reasonably well should try designing the art as

As a hacker/founder who has also taken up the art/design role, I disagree and think that developers who can draw reasonably well should try designing the art assets for their startups. When you design your own art assets, you can iterate on the design in a much more incremental way because the transaction cost of going out and finding a designer is quite high. When you can design your own assets in-house, the art can work its way into the core of the product better and ends up in more places. For instance, many of the modules my startup has released have silly cartoons that I drew: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/browserling-open-sources-90-node-modules/ http://www.catonmat.net/blog/browserling-open-sources-90-nod... When there are external barriers to art, you're probably going to use it less. Contracting out for all of those silly readme cartoons would be wildly uneconomical but for me it provides a nice refuge from coding all day that happens to help us establish credibility with potential customers and expand our product exposure. If you are a developer who is going to try your hand at doing the art yourself, I wouldn't be too concerned if your initial attempts look amateurish. Our earliest prototype looked really bad: http://substack.net/images/screenshots/browserling-1.png http://substack.net/images/screenshots/browserling-1.png but we iterated and made it a little better: http://substack.net/images/screenshots/browserling-3.png http://substack.net/images/screenshots/browserling-3.png and then did a redesign recently: http://browserling.com/ http://browserling.com/ Make some art!