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Comment by drewda | Hacker News Reader

This looks like a very nicely polished marketing website and SaaS product. If the creator would be open to sharing, I'd be curious to hear more about whether he's engaged contractors or firms to help with specific types of design over the years. Any lessons learned on that front?

I know there are many services that claim they'll sell you a "custom" logo for $100 or whatever... but assembling a nicely polished marketing site and product that look good together usually isn't as simple as that.

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My design skills are alright (see the 2019 screenshot in the post), but it took hiring a designer a few years ago to take it to the next level (see the site today). I found him on Tailwind Discord and have been very fortunate to work with him.

In retrospect I should have found someone much sooner given how important aesthetics are for a visualization tool like Preceden.

Makes sense. Would you be able to share a bit more about how you started off with the designer?

(Background: I'm asking because our SaaS business is at a point where we know it's ready for more polish for both marketing site and web app, but are unclear how much we should budget and whether we should go "all in" by hiring a designer who takes everything as far as CSS, or start with a couple targeted improvements that would be lower risk/budget first.)

I was lucky to find someone who can both design well and implement the changes in the codebase (using Tailwind CSS which I'd highly recommend). You can obviously have two separate people (one to design, one to implement), but if you can find someone who can do both it will simplify things.

For Preceden, we kind of just went page by page converting the old design over to Tailwind, making improvements along the way, and gradually ripping out all of the old CSS that had accumulated over a decade of me working on it. As I built out new features he would help with the design, but he spent the majority of his time improving the existing design.

It sounds like selecting Tailwind helped to make clear the specific skills you were looking to hire for and at what level you'd be working together. Good to know. Thanks for sharing.

The Precedent’s designer here. When I wrote my “for hire” ads, my bullet points were these:

· Typography-based design system with Figma · Robust CSS with Tailwind CSS · Straightforward JavaScript with Alpine.js or Stimulus

I also noted that my preferred back-end language and framework were Ruby and Rails (on which Preceden is built).

So being clear, specific, and knowing some solid technologies and design/code tactics helped me find someone like Matt, who has been a very good collaborator these past few years.

It was posted on Haker News (Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?), Reddit (r/forhire r/DesignJobs r/freelance_forhire), and Tailwind Discord.

*Preceden’s (not PrecedenT’s) :D

Thanks for sharing.

I am curious to hear how you start with new clients like this. Do you identify one task to do together with a very well defined scope and a fixed cost? Do you just get started on an hourly basis and whether it's working well together?

We’ll usually start with a task based on an hourly rate, not a fixed cost.

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