“How do I hire a designer?”
It’s one of the most common questions we get from the early-stage founders we work with. We’ve written about when and what to look for in a founding designer, but what are the specific tactics for attracting, sourcing, and closing them?
So we hosted a virtual session to tackle the nuts and bolts of design hiring in 2025. Nearly 1,000 people signed up, which should tell you something about how high the demand is for design talent right now.
The takeaway: the problem isn’t necessarily a lack of talented designers. It’s that market dynamics have shifted. AI has raised the baseline for product quality, big companies and startups are competing for increasingly similar profiles, and the hiring playbooks that worked even two years ago need updating.
Here’s the recording of the session:
View the deck in Figma Slides here (🪄pro tip: consider adding a comment to the “Classifieds” slide on slide 59 to get connected with designers or founders, whether you’re hiring or looking.)
For those who want to go deeper, we’ve put together a Design Hiring Resource Library with examples of effective job descriptions, hiring-related artifacts, a framework for evaluating skills, and tactics for every stage of the process.
The full resources cover a lot of ground, but if you’re short on time, here are the key lessons every founder should know when hiring their early designers:
1. The reality of competing for top designers
Hiring a great designer has never been quick or easy for most startups. But it’s doubly harder now, with demand for designers surging as AI accelerates product building. At the same time, both large and early stage companies are chasing an increasingly similar profile: full-stack designers with strong visual craft, business understanding, and the ability to design with and for AI.
This means the best designers have their pick of opportunities and likely more leverage than you.
Expect the process to take time. Be ready for outreach, follow-ups, rigorous back-channeling, and reviewing many portfolios. If designers aren’t knocking down your door, you need to be actively selling your vision.
The founders who consistently win top design talent start early and build relationships before they’re desperate. Check in via text as your product evolves. Hop on a plane to meet them in person. Host a small dinner for designers (this is how Faire hired their second designer).
When you find someone who could change your company’s trajectory, don’t hold back. Show genuine excitement. Involve your team so they can see the caliber of colleagues they’d be joining. Ask for their feedback on your product.
Also, don’t underestimate compensation as a signal. If you’re paying your founding designer significantly less than your engineers, you’re inadvertently telling them how much you value design. Pay them comparably to show you see design as equally critical.
2. Attract designers through design
Great designers gravitate toward companies that already show they value design. Saying “we have nothing yet” is not a selling point. They want evidence that the founder and team care about design so they can picture how their work would push things further.
Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp put it perfectly in our recent interview: “One of the superpowers of design is creating desire. With design, you can refine something you’re in love with, and it develops a gravity. People start to show up out of nowhere to work on it because it has this draw.” This gravitational pull extends beyond users to the designers you want to hire.
You can do this in plenty of ways: share early brand or product artifacts (the team at Operate does this well), make it clear in your JD why design is important to your company, or spin up a Notion page that shows how design fits into the way you work. The point is to consistently signal that design matters.
But the one thing that kept coming up when we asked designers what they look for: a strong marketing site.
“The best thing I used wasn’t an AI tool or a recruiter, it was hiring a great designer to rebuild our website,” said one founder. “It told the world we care about design without me saying it in a job description. Designers saw it and thought, ‘If I join, my work will be prioritized and held to a high bar.’” After countless tactics and reviewing hundreds of portfolios, redesigning the site finally unlocked interest from top design candidates and helped them land a founding designer.
There’s really no excuse today for having a poor marketing site. With tools like Framer and accessible design agencies, what used to be a differentiator is now table stakes. It’s far too easy for people to assume you don’t value design if your site is mediocre.
Founders often frame this as a chicken-and-egg problem: how can you attract designers through design if you don’t have one yet? The answer is simple. Tap into the ecosystem. Work with freelancers and agencies. Bring on a fractional designer for a few months. You want to demonstrate that design is important enough for you to invest in from day one, even without full-time hire.
3. Mine your own network, then expand
The best place to start is your own network, then your team’s and investors’. But don’t just blast out “know any designers?” emails. Frame the ask so people can picture the right profile: independent IC, strong visual craft, early-stage appetite. Track referrals systematically in a spreadsheet with names, status, notes. Consider running a “sourceathon” where the whole team spends an hour combing through alumni groups, social feeds, and communities to drop names into a shared doc.
Once you’ve gone through the obvious circles, expand to less crowded ponds. Some of the strongest designers didn’t study design at all. They came from front-end engineering, film, or economics, and built their design careers by making and shipping. Others are juniors emerging from top programs like RISD, UCLA, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford d.school - or skipping school entirely and building/sharing great work online.
Don’t limit your search by geography either. There are deep pools of design talent in places like Toronto (e.g. Flo Guo, founding designer of Paradigm), Austin (e.g. Phi Hoang, who’s behind Perplexity’s brand experience), as well as across Europe and India. We tend to recommend that early teams work together in person, but if your company is remote-friendly, this dramatically broadens the funnel.
One more tip: reverse-engineer the products you admire. If you love using Linear, Granola, or another tool, figure out who designed it and reach out to them, even for referrals to other designers they know.
4. The new bar for early design talent
Startups need designers who can handle chaos - comfortable with ambiguity, moving quickly without direction, resilient under pressure. But the bar has gotten higher.
You want designers who operate across the full spectrum: strong visual skills, systems thinking, and a clear line of sight between their work and business results. They iterate in hours instead of weeks and are already experimenting with AI tools to ship faster. As one founder put it, “If I ask a designer whether they’ve tried Claude Artifacts or prototyping with AI and they show zero interest, that’s a red flag.”
Most importantly, they balance craft with speed. They want to ship high-quality work but understand especially at the pre-PMF stage, that prototyping and iterating quickly is crucial. They know when an extra week of polish matters and when it doesn’t.
Go beyond polished portfolios (some of the best designers don’t keep updated ones). Ask to see work-in-progress or have them walk through something in Figma. You’ll learn more from how they discuss tradeoffs than from perfectly put-together case studies.
Pay attention to their questions too. “What does your design system look like?” suggests someone better suited for later stage. “What’s the biggest user problem you’re not solving?” - now you’re getting somewhere.
5. Get references earlier than you think
Get references early in the process, sometimes even before a phone screen.
There are a couple of reasons for this. Many founders hiring a designer for the first time don’t have a strong sense of how to evaluate candidates. You may not know what a good portfolio looks like or how to interpret case studies. Talking to someone who has worked closely with the candidate as a designer can give you a more grounded perspective.
References also help close the gap between how someone interviews and how they work day to day. It’s easy to be influenced by a polished presentation, but that doesn’t always translate to execution. Ask the people they’ve worked with simple, direct questions: Would you work with them again? Where did they stand out? How did they contribute to the team?
Pay close attention to the tone of the response. Real enthusiasm usually comes through. Anything less than a clear “yes” should make you cautious. If a reference says something like “incredible designer, but people struggled to work with them,” treat that as a stop sign. That one call can save you from making the wrong hire.
Hiring great designers takes patience, but getting the fundamentals right - showing you value design, building relationships early, evaluating for the right skills - will put you ahead of most founders who are winging it.
Explore our Design Hiring Resource Library for more tactics and examples, as well as the slide deck from our recent virtual event on the topic.
More resources for founders and designers
If you’re a founder who deeply values design and are raising, we’d love to hear from you. Refer yourself here.
If you’re a designer who’s looking for a role, join our talent network or check out our job board for open roles at Designer Fund portfolio companies
If you’re a founder or hiring manager, we recommend that you check out Liftoff, a referral-driven hiring platform with deep networks in design, product, and marketing. They’ve helped companies like Loom and Ramp make exceptional design hires. Join the waitlist here and mention Designer Fund to skip the line.
About Designer Fund
Designer Fund invests early in companies that use design to improve health, sustainability, and prosperity for all people. We provide founders with expertise on hiring and managing design teams, product and brand advice, and designer professional development with our community of design leaders. We’ve backed exceptional companies like Stripe, Gusto, Notion, Framer, Commure, and Netlify.
