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Ask YC: Where to find great freelance designers?

2 points by johnnycage ↗ HN
Hi there. Hoping you guys might help. We've created an app for the creative industries but we're really struggling to find a good freelance designer who can produce good quality work. We've tried eLance and a couple of other sites but the quality we're getting isn't good. There must be a secret hidden site somewhere (slightly joking) where these guys all hang out!! Any suggestions greatly received

4 comments

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markbao
Maybe try crowdsourcing a design from http://99designs.com/
johnnycage
Thanks for this. I don't feel comfortable with that to be honest - I think this site is good (and there's another similar) but I don't like the idea that there's only one winner and other people put work/effort into it only to not get paid. I will know, from a previous portfolio, who is the right person and someone who we can work with together
SwellJoe
I've had good results from 99designs (formerly sitepoint contests), but the prices have grown at a pretty rapid clip, to the point where the cost of starting a contest is a significant portion of the cost of holding the contest. I plan to try a different contest site in the future.

There are some negatives--refinement of designs is not really part of the process, the way it is when you work with a single designer. I've found that most of the designers (by necessity) spend a few minutes whipping up a few entries. If any of them get good feedback, they'll polish them a little, and hope for the best.

But, the positives are that a surprisingly large number of really good designers will submit work. We've been very happy with all of the contests we've held. We got a new logo for Webmin for $500, which turned out awesome. Likewise for a logo for our new virtualization management product. I'm planning to get some banner ads made next.

I've worked with designers in the past, and even in cases where I love their work, in general, sometimes they just don't have the right idea or execution for a particular project. The contest model allows a lot of designers to toss out their ideas. And, honestly, it's a lot more like the way large corporations have their design work done. Design shops, the really big/famous ones, will frequently do some mockups before any money changes hands...design i very often done on spec. Us little guys don't have the million dollar design budget to throw around that allows us to just call up our favorite five shops and say, "We're doing a new campaign. Show us your ideas." A contest site like 99designs.com allows us to effectively do that.

utnick
half the people on tumblr seem to be designers... just keep browsing random tumblrs until you find a design or artist that you like and then contact them.