(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.)
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.
· 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.
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?