You don't have to do everything on your own, and you definitely shouldn't compromise on design if you want your project to succeed.
- you may not be able to find the talent where you are (good designers are not uniformly distributed, and remote may not be possible for you. Source: lived in Africa)
- you may want/need to know the basics to evaluate the work of a designer, hire one or just communicate efficiently with one
- you may just be curious, and want to learn that for you. Or transition to be, you know, a designer :)
Unless it is an open source project I feel it would be rude to ask someone to work for free on it.
Presumably you'd exchange % of future revenue / profit share, or an equity split if it's a company.
Or if it's not a revenue-generating project, there might still be people who would help you out in order to build their portfolio.
I said work with a designer, as in a collaboration. As in bring them onboard as a co-founder, give them equity, have an agreement to share profits. Pay them if you can. Share skills by getting them to do design work on your side project in return for coding their side project. There are lots of ways to work with people.
I am absolutely not suggesting anyone asks someone to work for free. That's exploiting people. Don't do that.
They'd both be high though, that's for sure.
But I believe a UX designer would make a great co-founder if they focus on user research, information architecture, and interaction design.
I don't know much about UX designers jobs, do they deal with project management often?
[1] Conversely, a lot of product managers do not have the same UX sense of a good designer. My favorite PMs are ones that have a solid UX background.
Product management and UX get pretty blurry (positively) when product management wants to generate value to customers by listening to them/distilling what users want into a good strategy that meshes with the business.
Project and program management are detached from the skill set of both product manager and UX experts. One can have the skills, but it is not because they know product or UX.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Chesky
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Gebbia
That’s 2 out of 3 co-founders.
That said wouldn't it be risky to bring someone you hardly know on as cofounder?
Does anyone here have good experience with that?
How can a person with minimal design skills (ie. me) tell if a designer is any good? I know when I like something, but I can't trust my own taste.
This sounds like a pretty cynical take. I know plenty of designers who want to design for tech, not because they "don't have the skills" to "build tech stuff" but because they have different skills, aka design skills (user research methods, applying UX best practices, visual design, the list goes on). Although many design departments may have originally started under engineering, I like to think that designers have much more to contribute than being developer-wannabes that your comment might imply.
That said, I agree with the rest of what you said! There are lots of designers out there who want a chance to practice their skills, and I encourage everyone to at least get your project design critiqued!
> Reach out to some on social media
Any tips on how, or where?
My experience with fiverr is very much "hit or miss" and getting designers interested for a startup in very early phase is hard in my experience.
fiverr (or Upwork etc) are just meat markets and a race to the bottom, being hit or miss should be expected from those platforms: if you try to buy things on the [extreme end of] cheap, then often the end product is not going to be particularly good.
How are you paying them? Fiverr is a low-price marketplace and not where I'd try to find the best talent. Getting good Fiverr designs requires a lot of work and some understanding of design. The latter seems to run counter to this thread. Ultimately, you won't get great design on the cheap.
My personal experience is the lowest cost option for really great design is having a couple of thousand dollars on retainer with a contract designer, or small design agency. Go through your working prototype and see how they can uplift the existing design within your budget. If you can come inside budget then get the same designers back later for more bits and pieces. This is how you build up a relationship and they might cut you some slack, such as doing an updated email template, or some other one-offs.
Using bootstrap, or another standard framework is a potential win. They may be able to provide customizations for you directly. If you have a completely custom frontend, or something that's highly engineered, then it's harder and more expensive for developers to work with you.
It goes without saying that you need to own the copyrights on the assets they create for you. The other part is that you need things in the right formats. If they created illustrations, then get the original AI files, not only the exported image files. If you have the source files, then you can make your own tweaks later. So many people forget to think about this. I've had to make tweaks 100% of the time. Copyright issues will come up much later and hinder you when you are successful, but it's easy to deal with those initially.
If you don't have a couple of thousand to budget toward design then you should stick to generic templates because designers don't work for free. They generally don't win from startup success because of the bias towards engineers, so don't expect them to keen to work based on some promise of success and payment later.
I am well aware of fiverr being the low-end of the spectrum, which is why I used that as example. As opposed to "finding a designer", which is costly.
I was not trying to argue that I want to hire a designer for a fiverr-price. Slavery has been abolished in Europe and I would not like to bring it back, thank you very much.
The advise to move forward with commonly known frameworks such as Bootstrap is a good one. As it allows to bring in (and properly pay!) designers when you can afford it.