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Ask HN: Where do you get your design work done?

8 points by solo960 ↗ HN
A lot of new start ups have simple but good looking websites and UI's. Some teams have a full time designer on board, some coders are talented designers themselves but about for a one man pure code monkey like myself?

Where can I get web templates and UI work done on a start up's budget? I have tried freelance sites and used companies from all parts of the spectrum with mixed results. Either they were over priced, took too long, or had no idea how to design functional UIs.

Help!

7 comments

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illdave
Check out the admin templates on ThemeForest.net, also have a look at Bootstrap by Twitter: http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap

You can always pay a talented designer to redesign your app if it starts to get a ton of users, until then these options let you focus on your code.

solo960
thanks for themeforest.net, the site I had been using in the past was costing $75-250 per template and they were geared more towards commercial than what I needed. These are much more in tune with what I am looking for.
ig1
I think (although I might be mistaken) you mean "too expensive" rather than "over priced", the later implies that you thought you didn't get value for money while the prior covers the case where the cost was just outside of your budget range without taking a position on the value delivered.
solo960
Good point, it is an important distinction to be made but I did mean over priced. One company charged me (ripped me off) $500 for 3 "unique" logo and business card concepts. They had a very good rating and feedback on the site and looked trustworthy. I paid them, 4 hours later they provided me 3 stock images (which I traced to iStock) with my contact info on it. The stock images they used were also totally unrelated and generic. When I complained the response I got was "You paid for 3 concepts and we delivered." So I emailed the CEO of the company and it turns out the guy I was dealing with was the CEO! Lessons to be learned.
iamjonlee
One lesson I learned form my hunt for logo designers was to hire by hour. Maybe coincidental, but I tend to hire freelance designers from Europe at hourly rates of $30-$70. While I did encounter mix results, all the design work was still considered very high quality.

For 5 basic concepts, it ran me around 7 hours, after which adding another 5 hours for coloring, textures, shadow, typography comes out to be around $500-$700. For 3 "unique" logo and business card concepts, it seems too good to be true.

Sorry about your bad experience, better luck next time!