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Ask HN: How do you hire freelance designers?

3 points| eduardordm | 13 years ago | reply

I've been trying to hire a freelance designer to build me a landing page for 3 days. I went to dribble.com and tried to contact exactly 21 designers. NONE of them answered to my emails. How do you people hire designers?

7 comments

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[+] ssazesh|13 years ago|reply
My experience with quality designers on dribbble is that they don't take on very small jobs. They get hit up a lot so you have to appear worthwhile ($$$). Here is the email I used to reach out and got 8 responses contacting 12 designers:

---

Hi [name],

I'm the co-founder of [startup]. I saw your work on Dribbble - impressive! We are looking to do a design overhaul and I wanted to chat to see if this is something you would be interested in.

Would you have some time this week to jump on a skype call?

Thanks

---

Your project could be too small for them to respond. Have you considered 99designs or using Elance, Odesk, etc?

[+] eduardordm|13 years ago|reply
I'll try 99designs. I don't like the way Elance works, it's feels way too focused on getting me to signed up (and paying) instead of getting my project to work.
[+] fideloper|13 years ago|reply
How do you format your emails?

If you have a site, you can create a careers page and keep a backlog of developers/designers to have for when you need any.

Of course, networking is a great way to go, and also give you another source of resume backlogs.

[+] eduardordm|13 years ago|reply
This is pretty much the standart e-mail I've been sending:

Hi X

I'm a startup founder in Y We have a product that is finished (functionality-wise) but we are not designers at all. We used twitter bootstrap to build a good of this app, which is pretty ok for now. Thing is, we can't get to build a good welcome page. The welcome page is pretty much a login/signup page with some text and screenshots in it. (see attachment)

I would like to know if you are available and if you could provide me some quotation to build us a single welcome page containing a login and signup. You would use twitter bootstrap and the html that is already there (we could customize if required).

[+] eduardordm|13 years ago|reply
It's interesting, really. In this specific case, I find myself stuck in a situation where maybe I'm an opportunity lots of people are waiting for, but at the end, no one takes.
[+] orangethirty|13 years ago|reply
Shoot me an email, I might be able to help you with it.