Ask HN: how much to budget for design?

2 points·solofndr··3 comments

I've been working part time on a web app for the industry I work in. I've almost finished the back-end but have next to no design skill and very little front-end experience. What would be a reasonable budget to outsource the design? I'll need 5 unique pages and another 5 generic ones to use as a model for further pages. I'd like the design to be responsive to be mobile devices, tablets and desktops.

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1. Spec the job - page count is good, but how complex are those pages? Make a wireframe which shows EVERYTHING. And if there is something you can't show (example: "a logo flies onto the screen") make a note of it.

2. Show your well thought out spec to any designer and ask for an estimate!

3. Eve if you designer is a kid out of school with no experience you can make them take a guess on each page.

4. factor in the fact that there will be a number of revisions after the designer shows you something. Figure at least two to three rounds.

Just so you know, as a designer I can tell you that so many people never bother with step #1 and waste money and have their projects go off the tracks as a result.

So, you need 10 templates or just 10 HTML pages built from the same template?

Is there a lot of front-end functionality that needs to be built (ajax calls, form validation, etc) or just basic HTML pages?

Depends on the scale. Check sortfolio.com for some ideas though :)

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