Ask HN: Developers, how did you find a designer to make your product look great? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Developers, how did you find a designer to make your product look great?

1 pointandrewstuart2 comments

Any developers out there who went from terrible looking product to awesome by getting a designer?

Developers make functional stuff that often looks terrible or very average.

And people say “you really need a designer to make that look great”.

But how do you even do that?

I imagine it would be hard for a non developer to find a great developer. Seems like a non designer has the same challenge finding a designer.

I don’t want to go bottom of the market but I also don’t have the money to match corporate design rates, so I also have no idea what to pay.

Did you go from ugly to beautiful and how did you do it, curious to know.

I can help you with this; the best way for me to do that is to "show vs. tell" though, so I'd need to see your current product & understand how it is useful.

I've been a UX/Product Designer for 20 years. I have a formal education in Design & Cognitive Science. Here is my portfolio for reference--it needs an update, but there are detailed case studies on there that will be useful for you to get an understanding of the process behind the designs. Hit me up :)

http://www.jenndiamonddesign.com/privatePF2.html

I replied to cold outreach from designers. To vet, I took calls to see their actual portfolio (actual prior work in Figma, for instance), asked about their processes, areas of strength/weakness, types of work (illustrations only? css help? slides? products or only landing pages? which types of target audiences they've had?), etc.

Might be useful to comment on what your budget is. Having an external design team that knows you and can work fast when there's a crunch is very useful as it removes the latency inherent with one-off task based platforms. Plus, you get a consistent level of quality.

If you don't have enough work to keep designers busy on a day to day basis, then it may not be worth it to get a long contract. On the other hand, things often take longer than you expect to iterate and refine.

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