
Ask HN: How do I hire a designer as an indie dev? - steveridout
I’m about to hire a designer for the first time for Readlang (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;readlang.com).<p>My previous experience is limited to spending $20 on fiverr, see the results here: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@SteveRidout&#x2F;redesign-my-landing-page-for-1000-kudos-72f0cd57c04a#.3g3uz1i7h<p>This time I’m looking for a designer to help with the brand, color scheme, fonts, logo, visual language, (optionally) illustration and to apply this to the landing page. I’ve offered $1000 for this in the above Medium post and on https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;designjobs . The deadline is Fri 22nd Jan. So far I’ve had 33 applications, and would like some tips on:<p>- How to choose the best applicant?<p>- Is this a good approach?<p>- Does the price ($1000) sound reasonable?<p>- How do you find a good designer?<p>These are fuzzy questions, but I’m interested in opinions about this from both sides - designers and those who’ve contracted designers.
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rajacombinator
I'm also an indie dev. My take on your questions:

\- Look at their portfolios, make judgment calls about which ones do the best
work, narrow it down to a short list. I would then have a brief chat/exchange
with the short list members to try to learn a bit about their process. My goal
here is to evaluate whether I think this person is thoughtful about what they
are doing, can communicate sufficiently, and can mostly direct themselves. (If
I knew exactly what I wanted I wouldn't be hiring a designer.) After this, if
you want to be extra cautious, you could ask for a few references. But for
your budget, if the previous steps check out I would probably just skip that
step.

\- I think your approach of posting a job for bidding is probably not best
although I haven't tried this myself and not familiar with that subreddit. You
want to pre-select the quality designers who are likely in demand already.

\- Your budget is pretty low for all the items you listed. At that price range
for all the things you want, you're probably going to be limiting yourself to
people who can't improve what you currently have in a major way without
direction from you.

\- My approach when I tried this recently was to go on dribbble, check out
shots of the thing I was looking for (in my case logos - in your case landing
pages), and make a list of great designers who had a lot of examples of what I
wanted.

Some more feedback:

\- Why change the logo? What you have right now is great A+.

\- Fonts and color scheme are not great but probably not that important right
now.

\- If you hire a designer, focus on someone who specifically has experience
building great landing pages.

\- The problem with your landing page is the visual clarity and messaging of
explaining the value prop to the user. Right now it's somewhat visually
overwhelming due to lots of text, moving things, poor job of creating contrast
between sections and call outs. I'm not sure where my eyes should look when I
hit the page. Copy, ie the wording, could improve also.

\- Design is not as hard as you think. You can probably get 75% as good a the
result as a pro designer by spending two afternoons studying examples of other
well designed landing pages and paying attention to details of what they did,
then applying it yourself. You will learn a lot in the process too.

HTH, feel free to ping me at hnusername[0:4] @ u [windy city] edu.

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brudgers
Having looked at the site, if it's not successful enough to justify paying a
great deal more than $1000 for branding and redesign, then it's not worth
putting effort into managing a branding and redesign at the cost of making it
successful enough where $20,000 isn't an issue. In other words, does it
already look good enough that appearance is unlikely to be affecting growth
among the demographic likely to use it?

Redesign of the website should be based on good user analytics and the people
who can do that well are expensive relative to fiver and other find-the-low-
bidder sites. They're expensive because they're busy with clients who can pay
well.

Good luck.

~~~
steveridout
Hmmm, I'm worried that you're right. But $20,000 is at least 10 times what I'm
comfortable spending at this stage.

Is there no option in between fiverr and $20K that would be a worthwhile
investment?

~~~
brudgers
My question is: what _evidence_ did you use to determine that the design of
the website is the bottleneck for growth?

If it's not the bottleneck, then $10 is too much.

To get sound evidence that the design is the bottle neck the expertise for
such determination is probably an order of magnitude more than you are looking
to spend.

