Ask YC: Where do you guys find designers for your projects?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=77765

by nanijoe • 19 years ago

12 14 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

tjic• 19 years ago

I've gotten recommendations from several people...and none of the recommended designers were all that great. The one I use all the time I met on the general interest town mailing list - we are two libertarians in a sea of Massachusetts Democrats. We ended up getting together for poker first, became friends next, and now we farm out tons of design work to him.

Note: no guarantees that this process will work for you.

ivan• 19 years ago

I always thought that Americans are first business partners and then become friends. Your story looks like a strange deviation :)

downer• 19 years ago

Everywhere -- rip, mix, burn.

mwerty2• 19 years ago

huh?

e1ven• 19 years ago

I believe he's advising to look at the sites that you find attractive- See what elements they have that you can emulate.

As someone mentioned in an earlier thread, one easy way to get better at good design is to use good reference designs.

jakewolf2• 19 years ago

I'm using my little brother who owes me a favor and is an awesome designer.

Find sites you like, ask who their designer is.

csszengarden.com or oswd.org

brlewis• 19 years ago

Look at csszengarden if you have a decent budget. Go to oswd if you're looking for cheap.

I'm very happy with a designer I found via csszengarden, but she isn't cheap. I'll write a blog post about the whole process when it's done. Currently ourdoings.com is using a half-finished design from her, because even half finished it's 10x better than what I had before.

jakewolf2• 19 years ago

Can anyone give a range of prices they've paid for designs?

Tichy• 19 years ago

Found mine on xing. One I found by comparing the works of several designers I found on Xing. Another one found me on Xing when he needed a coder, and in turn I asked him to design.

carpal• 19 years ago

I've used rentacoder.com in the past and didn't have great results.

Now I just tend to do it myself, with mixed results.

plusbryan• 19 years ago

yeah, for whatever reason graphic designers don't tend to congregate there. great for cheap little programming tasks, not so great for original design.

I think it has something to do with the fact that you can turn out shoddy code that produces a functional program, whereas shoddy design is immediately apparent

that's why a lot of design stuff you get when outsourcing is template-based and replicated across multiple sites.

davidw• 19 years ago

I found a couple the other week when I took off all the cushions on the couch and looked at the stuff that had fallen down there.

rms• 19 years ago

http://www.programmermeetdesigner.com/

Ask YC: Where do you guys find designers for your projects?

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