Offer HN: free design work.

[sahillavingia]

Inspired by http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1826828 I decided to see if HN would be open to the idea of a weekly "giveaway" for around 5 or so design hours [1]. And the idea seemed to go over well, so I've decided to do it.

The first one is today. Just comment with a link to your project/company. After around 24 hours I'll pick the post with the most upvotes and send them an email.

In return for the design hours, I'd love to write a blogpost with a before/after and about the overall process.

I think it'll be fun. :)

[1] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1827654

[SkyMarshal]

Africa Nutrition Society - http://answeb.org/

I'm doing pro-bono work for them to move their flat html to a CMS so the people running the organization can update news, events, calendar, etc. on their own without need for tech support, but am still just evaluating CMS's and hosts (probably gonna be Django-cms or Vosao on GAE for the amazing price point).

Their flat html site was designed by a company in UK, but is not as modern looking as it could be, and the information architecture is busy imho. They don't have all the content available for it yet either, but had to make it public for their annual African Nutritional Epidemiology conference in early October. It's also all table-based, and converting the non-tabular elements to div/span something I'd like to do, but getting it converted over to a CMS is a higher priority.

I've got my hands full getting the backend up and running and would love to have a review by a pro web designer. In addition to being able to blog about it, I'd be happy to include 'Design by Sahillavingia' at the bottom and introduce you (via email at least) to the organization principals.

[sahillavingia]

You "win." I'll be contacting you... now. :)

EDIT: I can't find an email address on your profile, could you email me (in prof.)? Thanks!

[neilkod]

http://www.mymomjust.com and http://www.mydadjust.com. Using hadoop/pig, I searched through my 620-million strong twitter archive for all tweets containing "My Mom/Dad Just....." The results are hilarious. It's just a single-page site and could be some low-hanging design fruit.

[mikeklaas]

I think your site already looks quite good. Just clean up the about bar (remove underlines, vertical center text, add more space between each item)

[manveru]

mydadjust.com has <title>My Mom Just...</title>

[ronnier]

http://ihackernews.com - HackerNews for iPhone/Android/Mobile phones.

[csmeder]

I love ihackernews.com, I just emailed you.

[huhtenberg]

^^ Great idea. A proper iPhone/Android web interface for HN would be awesome.

[samdalton]

http://fairtradeauckland.org/

Fair trade is an industry that places emphasis on the producers of goods, rather than the distributors of them. A group of people in Auckland, New Zealand, are donating their time and resources to try and convert Auckland to be a fair trade city. With a population of over 1M people, this would make a significant difference to the lives of many producers in developing areas.

I've been managing social media and IT for the group, but we've yet to find a good design for our branding. The website above is a temporary page with some basic information, however as you can see it's nothing flash.

The entire project is coming from community efforts, so this would fit us perfectly, and if we're successful in our goal, many people around the world will benefit.

[jacquesm]

Hey Sahil,

I'd very much like to take you up on your offer of doing design work but I would feel embarrassed to see you do it for free which means I can not enter in this round.

But if after you're done doing this really fantastically nice thing you feel you still have energy left over to do one more site and get paid for it then let me know, email in my profile.

greetings,

  Jacques

[nowarninglabel]

http://www.staticbuzz.com/ - Implementation of Q&A site model, done in the Drupal cms. Bonus, if this is picked, I'll make your design into a theme and contribute it back to drupal.org where the ArrayShift install profile is still in need of a good default theme. (*Note: The is site is hardly used, but I've actually used it many times to showcase what Drupal can do)

[lyime]

http://mugasha.com We make it really easy to listen to long DJ sets. Best place for listening to electronic dance music.

[anujv]

I have used you guys before, pretty good site, well designed. It would be cool to see more social integration with your site. I like hypem.com (for listening to music) because of its integration with for instance, last.fm. Really spurs for discussion and brings me back to the site to listen to music.

[rolandal]

Mugasha is an awesome way to browse and sift through sets!

[kareemm]

cool post :)

we just redesigned http://www.easycalapp.com - a frustration-free booking calendar for solo entrepreneurs - but we need a sales page.

[JimEngland]

Quick thing to fix:

When the page loads in my browser (1366x768 resolution), it automatically scrolls me down the page a bit, enough so that I cannot see the EasyCal logo without scrolling back up.

This is because of the auto-focus on the email address text field under "Interested in using Easy Cal?". Maybe remove that and only apply it when "I want to try it!" is clicked?

[prpon]

Kareem, I may not be the intended audience for your webapp but I couldn't figure out what the term 'booking' calendar meant. May be you could put up a few situations when someone would use your app to help understand your app better.

[ronnier]

The blue is really strong, but other than that, I think it looks fine.

[phamilton]

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/park-in-the-shade/id391296993...

It's a simple fun iphone app.

[ashbrahma]

Neat idea!!

[michaelfairley]

http://remembersaurus.com - My recently launched webapp, and also my first attempt at making something look decent on the web.

[philfreo]

Hey we're doing some really similar stuff at Quizlet.com (small startup but over 1 million registered users), let me know if you want to chat.

http://quizlet.com/

[anthonyc]

CityReporter - http://plus1lab.com/about-cityreporter

It's a service for state and local governments to improve their customer service relationship with their citizens. It implements the Open311 GeoReport v2 API, meaning the data is open and Free.

We could really use a nice theme for the web administration interface! I have no idea if that fits within your 5 allotted hours though.

[happybuy]

I'm looking to produce a few banner ads for our new startup: http://www.happybuy.com/

Would be interested in an outsiders thoughts on the best creative to express the idea of the site and have banner-ad viewers turn into active users.

My initial thought would be to simply have different banner ads highlighting a product along with its price graph. It quickly shows the utility of the site and how you can save money by knowing the best time to buy. Turning product info such as:

http://www.happybuy.com/product/Apple-iPad-MB292LLA-Tablet-1...

into a mini-banner ad could provide some insight, more so than a simple brand focused ad.

[mr_november]

http://peerlove.com - web based employee recognition

[daleathan]

Hello Sahil,

Excellent offer, I hope you have fun creating and blogging about the process.

I would like to suggest creating a logo for the Gramps project [1] (a Genealogy Program) which I just found a few days ago and in a reply to me one the developers mentioned that they have "No real official logo."[2] and from the looks of the project they could use a new wiki template[3].

Please consider upvoting to help improve the project.

[1] - http://gramps-project.org/ [2] - http://goo.gl/JDN1 [3] - http://www.gramps-project.org/wiki

[manveru]

I should replace myself with a bot that does this, but here's the real URL of [2]: http://gramps.1791082.n4.nabble.com/Impressed-with-Gramps-an...

[perucoder]

http://maziesoftware.com/

Please help! I'm always hard on my own designs but I dont think my current one is good at all. My product is a meeting management web app.

[andrewacove]

http://www.getaquirk.com/ Ties your social network accounts (FB, Twitter, 4SQ) to a QR code. Scan to connect.

Main focus is on getting users past the home page to sign up for the service. What's there still doesn't do a good enough job convincing the users why they should sign up.

The next problem is getting users to actually connect through the service. Channeling users to download a scanner app and download their QR code is probably the next major step.

[cosjef]

Startup Weekend Atlanta (Start Atlanta)! We are planning the 3rd annual startup weekend in Atlanta. We have a base Wordpress site up, and need some graphic design help. The more pressing need is for a logo. The event will be held at the Georgia Tech ATDC in January 2011. Our team of 6 has no graphic design expertise, and we will otherwise have to pay for the design work out of sponsorship dollars. The upside for you is getting your design in front of Atlanta's entrepreneurship community. Sound like a win-win?

[casabian]

I'm doing a project in which I live in a different neighborhood in New York City with different people every week. I guess I'd rather see this go to the Africa nutrition society but I'd love to improve the site and do some cool things with maps / linking to specific posts.

The site is on tumblr right now at http://thenycnomad.tumblr.com.

Thanks!

[csomar]

I'm building an HTML5 Video Player. I would be interested in a nice and custom carcass for it. (That is the buttons, progress bar, volume...)