Ask HN: where have all the designers gone? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: where have all the designers gone?

13 pointsceprim6 comments

Long story short, my cofounder had to leave for personal reasons. I'm going to carry on and do the business development as well as coding, but I find UX and design incredibly difficult. In fact, that's what's stopping me launching a beta.

I've been contacting freelance designers but I'm getting quotes of around 3k which is beyond my budget. No joy with odesk or elance either - I can only find web designers with experience of brochure sites on there. I'm not looking for a "heavyweight" designer, just someone with a good eye for usability that knows html and css. Does anyone have suggestions about where else to look?

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Have you considered using a framework like Twitter Bootstrap or something of that nature? It sounds to me like that's the way to go to launch quickly.

I expect what you'll find is that even though the designer may have made an awesome design the requirments change and you'll need to 'redesign' sooner rather than later. So, you'll be stuck in the same place again. Twitter Bootstrap lets you get around this problem and provides you'll be able to maintain it long term.

It might help to know that there is typiclly a design step and there is a slicing step. Former yields a pixel-perfect Photoshop sketch of the UI flow, and slicing is what converts it to the actual CSS/JS/HTML. You may try and check if divorcing these steps by using a designer for one and a dedicated slicing service for second (there is a lot of them out there) - if this would help reducing the cost.

For middle-tier designers, design students and affordably priced wannabes have a look at Forrst. That's the core of their user base and they have also recently launched a job mediation service.

I've done some design/UX work and am currently open to advising new/small startups on product/marketing. I'm happy to take a look and let you know what you could do to get to "good enough" without spending $3k -- my charge: FREE. Send me an email.

You haven't provided enough information to be sure, but $3k might just be what's required for the scope of your project.

If you put your email in your profile I'd be happy to contact you and discuss more (or feel free to email me).

I think 3k is reasonable for some of them given the quality of their work. However I don't need an amazing visual design, just something "good enough". I'm having trouble finding that middle ground.

Thanks for the offer to discuss, I'll email you shortly.

Sounds like you may need a template. that is, at least until you can afford a ux guy.

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