Choosing a designer
How to choose a designer for your web app
Design is the part of a project everyone has an opinion about and almost nobody knows how to buy. Portfolios are curated, taste is subjective, and the word 'designer' covers at least four different jobs. The useful question isn't who makes the prettiest work — it's who can make good decisions about your product when you're not in the room.
Rather just ask someone? Talk to usIn short
Work out which designer you need first: a visual designer makes it look right, a UX designer makes it work right, and a product designer does both while arguing about what to build. For a web app, hire a product or UX designer. Judge them on process and case studies, not on how pretty the screenshots are.
- Visual, UX, product — which designer do you need?
- A visual (or UI) designer decides how it looks: typography, colour, spacing, the feel of it. A UX designer decides how it works: flows, structure, what happens when things go wrong. A product designer covers both and takes a view on what should be built at all. A brand designer does your identity and is a different hire again. Most web app projects need a product or UX designer; hiring a visual designer for a product problem produces something beautiful that people can't use.
What actually matters
Read case studies, not portfolios
A grid of pretty screens tells you someone has good taste. A case study tells you how they think: what the problem was, what they tried, what they rejected and what happened after launch. If nobody can explain why the design is the way it is, they may not know.
Ask what they did versus what the team did
Portfolio work is often collaborative and credit is elastic. Ask specifically which parts they were responsible for. Good designers answer this precisely and without defensiveness — it's a normal question in their world.
Look for the unglamorous states
Anyone can design the happy path. Ask to see empty states, error messages, loading, permissions, long names, small screens and what the thing looks like with real, ugly data in it. That's where most designs quietly fall apart, and where experience shows.
Check whether they design for buildability
A design that ignores how software is actually built produces either a compromised result or a large bill. Designers who work closely with developers — or who can build a little themselves — hand over work that survives contact with implementation.
Watch how they handle disagreement
You will disagree about something. The question is whether they can explain their reasoning, take a genuine objection on board, and tell you plainly when they think you're wrong. Designers who fold instantly are as unhelpful as ones who never budge.
Decide whether you need a system or a screen
One-off screens are cheap and they compound into inconsistency. A small design system — colours, type, spacing, components — costs more at the start and makes every subsequent screen faster and more coherent. Anything you plan to keep building on wants a system.
Which designer for which job
Roughly, and with plenty of overlap in practice — many good designers cover more than one column.
| Criteria | Visual / UI | UX | Product |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Marketing sites, brand-led pages | Complex flows, dashboards, forms | Deciding what to build and then building it |
| Deliverables | Polished screens, style direction | Flows, wireframes, structure, testing | Strategy through to finished screens |
| Typical day rate (AU) | $600 – $1,000 | $800 – $1,400 | $900 – $1,600 |
| Risk if you pick wrong | Beautiful and confusing | Usable and forgettable | Overkill for a five-page site |
What to ask a designer
Six questions that separate people who make screens from people who solve problems.
- Walk me through a project from problem to outcome — what did you reject along the way?
- Which parts of this portfolio piece were yours?
- Can I see the error, empty and loading states for something you designed?
- How do you hand over to developers, and have you worked with our stack?
- How do you decide when a design is finished?
- What would you push back on in what I've just described to you?
Where we'd tell you otherwise
If you're building an internal tool that eight colleagues will use, a well-chosen component library and a developer with taste will get you most of the way, and hiring a dedicated designer is money better spent elsewhere. Design specialists earn their fee when the audience is external, the flows are genuinely complex, or the product has to compete on feel.
Want a second opinion?
Tell us what you're weighing up. We'll give you a straight answer, including when the answer is that you don't need us.
Common questions
Often not, at first — modern templates and AI tools produce competent-looking output. What they don't produce is a coherent system or good decisions about complex flows. The moment your product has real users doing non-obvious things, a designer starts paying for themselves.
Day rates typically run $600 to $1,600 depending on seniority and discipline. Project pricing is more common for defined work: a small marketing site design might be $2,000 to $6,000, while a web app's design system and core flows is usually $8,000 to $25,000.
One team is usually smoother — fewer handovers, fewer things lost in translation, one party accountable for the result. Separate specialists can be better when the design problem is genuinely hard and you want the best person for it rather than the most convenient.
Don't try to judge the aesthetics. Judge the reasoning: can they explain why each decision was made, in terms of your users and your business? Good designers can. It's the most reliable signal available to a non-designer.
Also worth a look
- How to Choose a Web Developer in Australia
- Freelancer, Agency or In-House?
- Should You Build an MVP or the Full Product?
- Already built something that's stuck? We fix those
Last reviewed . Prices are indicative Australian ranges, not quotes.