Pushed into design?

Here I was, cruising through Agile Web Development with Rails in the hope of finally wetting my toes in the web coding sea, thankful that it looked more and more like i’d have to do little to no design (html/css always freaked me out) when, suddenly, I bump into this essay from Getting Real saying I should design the interface first.

It even quotes some guy saying how awesome it was that when he was to build his web app he got all the html/css done first and how much that helped him.

I think I really don’t have this gift of making things pretty. I mean, I thought that I’d flip another page and find out that Rails beautifies things for me and all I have to do is enter the code. Can’t one just code and be left alone?

Alright, I can make paper sketches of things but, really, doing graphical design looks like so… much… work.