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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

page99test.com is gorgeous; who designed it?

Someone who thought using a 3 megabyte png of wood-grain texture with a pointless alpha-transparency gradient was a good idea.

Just composite it with the body background to obviate the transparency, make it a jpeg, and halve your page load time.

Was just reading about it here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1835288

Ahhh; I see that client list and leap to the assumption: "hellaciously expensive".

I thought the same thing, but not having a lot of experience hiring designers, I am curious what type of numbers we are actually talking.

1-5k? 5-10k? More?

With MailChimp in your portfolio? Substantially north of $10k, just on design work (no CSS, no implementation), if I'm guessing right.

WorryFreeLabs was surprisingly affordable. My partner Lance and I 'bootstrapped' these design costs with our bonuses from our day jobs (and didn't exhaust our bonuses with it). Without question, I'd recommend WorryFreeLabs if you're looking for a group to take your idea and bring it to life in design. We're continuing to work with them as we build out page99test.com, and they're as fantastic as ever.

If anyone's got a designer who can do that caliber of work for $5k, let me know.

screenshot/blurb/feature boxes is becoming far too common

Isn't that a good thing?

better than rounded corners, drop-shadows, over-sized fonts and large buttons with shadows, I guess.

But I am noticing this new design style (more a layout) - and I am not one to really focus on that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com