Ushering in a new term of sorts today is this new article from Nick Lo on the Zend Developer Zone talking about the Zend Framework and the "New Hybrid Designer":

While a good sense of aesthetics is important, it does not in itself directly equate to a well designed product. This is particularly true with web design, as a recent Web 2.0 Expo session entitled "The New Hybrid Designer" put it; "modern web design requires the coding savviness of a developer coupled with the aesthetics and user awareness of a designer".

The idea behind the article is to propose a simple setup of the Zend Framework that developers can use as the powerful system that it is and the designers can get into and understand how to use (things like building forms and templating the site). He touches on a few topics including the MVC pattern the Framework follows, security in the application and the "pretty URLs" that it allows.