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

[nanijoe]

[tjic]

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 → tjic]

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

[jakewolf]

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 → jakewolf]

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.

[jakewolf → brlewis]

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

[carpal]

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.

[solfox → carpal]

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.

[Tichy]

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.

[davidw]

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.

[kf]

http://www.programmermeetdesigner.com/

[downer]

Everywhere -- rip, mix, burn.

[mwerty → downer]

huh?

[e1ven → mwerty]

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.

[mwerty → e1ven]

Thanks. I had a parsing error.