The options can think of are:
1) Hire a full time designer who only produces sketches. I think this is a bit too expensive for us at this stage (3-4 person startup) but I'm open to dissenting opinions.
2) Hire a UI/UX developer who can do design + code in our react stack.
3) Outsource design sketches to a contracting firm, and have a separate frontend developer.
Which approach has worked best in your experiences? I prefer (2) but have no idea how hard it is to hire someone who can do both design + front end code.
Open to anything, UI is our main blocker to launch right now.
This won’t get you a lot of credit with folks, but if you just need something that looks good but doesn’t have a ton of distinctive functionality, you might consider buying a professionally coded front-end component library.
This advice probably won’t work for any UI where you want to really fine-tune the experience, which often professional designers will want to do.