In general I think the "design team" should be the "HTML and CSS" people. Today, by "design" people often mean "graphical design", which tends to attract more

In general I think the "design team" should be the "HTML and CSS" people. Today, by "design" people often mean "graphical design", which tends to attract more art-type people. But what is really needed is "UI design", which is a much broader discipline which involves art, technical stuff, and psychology. You need to think about "what looks good?", but also "what makes a good UI for our product", and "what can we reasonably implement without too much complexity?" Certainly in my experience this confusion between "graphical design" and "UI design" seems to be a huge chunk of the problem.