Stack Exchange employs a team of 6 designers, and as others have noted, we're looking to hire more. 6 is a tiny number of designers for a company like ours. One reason it's so small is that we don't just hire visual designers who create illustrations and designs in Photoshop and let others convert them for the web. As designer Donna Choi noted in her recent blog post:
Every designer executes on a wide range of problems - from designing application flows to illustrating unicorns to building out front-end experiences.
We have an incredibly well-rounded design team, each member of which is vital to the projects they're working on, right from the kickoff. They own huge projects, they design interactions, and they drive key feature development. And they create illustrations and custom skins for SE sites.
All of this is to say that our design positions are not just design positions. They're equal parts graphic design, product management, HCI, and front-end development. This kind of hybrid role is really hard to hire for, so that's one reason we still have a very small design team.
That's the first piece.
@animuson summed up the second piece nicely:
To be fair, letting users just create the design really wouldn't speed up the process all that much. Creating the design is the fun and easy part. Cutting it apart and integrating it into all the aspects of the site and making sure it doesn't break everything is the long and intense part that holds everything up. This is also why our designers have been working hard at standardizing things more across the sites - to make it much easier to complete this design integration process in the future.
Custom site designs weren't designed to be future-proof. We're encountering scale problems that weren't anticipated when the system was implemented. For example, we recently rolled out a redesign of the user profile page. It was a nightmare to roll it out across the network because each graduated site had just enough customization to require the profile conversion to be done by hand. Instead of doing that, the design team decided that the smarter choice would be to standardize site designs, so that this and future new features can be more efficiently rolled out across the network.
It's taking a long time, because we have a lot of sites. They're 73% done with this project, and it's slow going, because each designer also has about a thousand other projects on their desk. Site designs are in the same situation. There's a backlog, and the backlog is being worked on, but just throwing more people at the problem - whether by hiring them or by soliciting help from users - probably isn't going to make the backlog go away any faster.
We do hire freelancers and outsource projects to other design firms occasionally, but that sort of thing is usually one-off projects and straight-up graphic design projects. Things like site designs that are so tightly integrated with what it means to be a Stack Exchange community are kept in-house.
