Ask IH: How did you hire a designer?
Hello fellow Indie Hackers,
Tu summarize the post, any tips or hints that you want to share about hiring and managing a designer in your team would be awesome. Tell me how you do it, that would also help a lot.
Let me give you some more context, my company is in its early stages.
I developed the web interface product mostly myself, and this includes the graphic design of the UI, and also the design of the user experience.
But I'm not a web designer or a UI designer, I'm a developer, and I did my own design ... ;-)
I used the Material Design theme, and because the widgets are so polished the UI looks very nice for the most part.
But the parts that I had to do from scratch with plain HTML and CSS, I think it shows that I'm not a designer, and I suspect that at times it gives the wrong impression of the product.
I used 99 designs for the design of my main home page (not the web app product), and I had a great experience.
But now, to take this to the next step, I think I need to hire a designer of some sort to help me out, someone that complements my skills.
I would like that person to review some of the main pages of my application, think of a way to improve the design, and implement it straight in SCSS.
I need for example some landing pages that my product generates for its users to be reviewed, the emails that the platforms sends need to be branded, I need a new logo, maybe a new website, I need branded PDF documents that I can use as templates that are generated by the platform, etc.
As you can see, I got a ton of work for this designer.
My questions are:
is it doable to hire someone who does both the design in photoshop and the implementation in HTML and CSS?
Or are those two separate skills that are rarely seen together?
How and where did you hire a designer?
Do you have them full time or on a part-time basis?
How do you integrate them in your product? Do you have them commit CSS straight to the code base, or ask them to create the HTML and then a developer needs to put it in the git repository?
Can most regular web designers that build websites and landing pages also do UI design well, or are these completely different skills?
Any insight from other Indie Hackers would be very much appreciated, thank you everyone.
If it were me, I would probably use Dribbble to look for a designer. A lot of designers post their designs there so you can also use that site to get an idea and feel of the designer's style.
They have a way to search for designers and they have job boards:
https://dribbble.com/designers
I think most of your other questions are really dependent on the designer. Designers come from all kinds of backgrounds (some may be developers who realized they liked design more and can probably do everything you listed and others may be photographers who transitioned to creating designs but don't have a technology background to implement the technical aspects).
If you really like a designer's work but they can't convert their designs into code, you could include a third person who specializes in that (or use a productized service like Fiverr to specifically convert designs to code).
As a full time freelancer myself (developer not designer), I would recommend hiring a freelancer for a small project. Have them do a small job for you to see if you are compatible. If you mesh well, then you can hire them for more work. Or if the two of you don't work well together, you could move on to someone else.
Hello, thank you for the tip on Dribble. I looked into it, and the minimum salary range of 50k is way over my budget, that is yearly salary I believe. Did I misunderstood the website, it's also possible to hire people for a one off work as well?
Dribbble was initially like an Instagram for designers - designers posted screenshots of their designs and shared them with others. The site has different sections - I'm guessing you were looking at the "Full-Time Designers" - on the left hand side of the screen, if you click "Freelance or Agency" you'll see designers with hourly rates posted:
https://dribbble.com/designers?tab=results&search[bookmarkCount]=0&search[workType]=freelance&search[searchUid]=undefined-1654293805663
On the right side of the screen you can then filter by min and max for hourly rate. In the footer menu, there is the option to "Post a freelance project".
It looks like to message anyone on the platform (or get advanced search features), you have to pay a subscription fee of at least $299 per month. Most experienced / good designers (who know their worth) are going to cost over $100 / hour so that is about the equivalent of three hours of a good designer so it sounds expensive (at least to me) but it is not outrageous when you think about the price of a good designer. (my guess is that you could probably find a way to contact some of these designers outside of Dribbble without paying a subscription fee)
I'm not positive but I believe it is free to post a freelance project/job on their system:
https://dribbble.com/freelance-jobs