How to get awesome graphics within your budget

This is bad advice for anyone who expects a great designer who you can communicate with easily and will understand your product and customer. This is great advice only for somebody who knows EXACTLY what they want, why they want it, and how it should be done.

$20-$25/hr will (very likely) get you either:

* A highly skilled designer in a foreign country without a firm grasp on English, American culture, or software (or whatever your industry might be). They will not be familiar with the ideals, customs, culture, or values of your customers. There will be hours wasted in communication and scheduling.

* A designer either currently in college or high school in the U.S. (I charged $20/hr when I was in 11th grade many years ago). This person will likely be O.K. at design, and have a good grasp on the customer. They will likely not know what they are doing with billing and time management, in addition to having other priorities, so your project has an alarmingly high change of being under-quoted and be delivered past deadline.

* On a rare occasion you get lucky - you might for example find a designer who just got laid off and doesn't know how much to charge and under-quoted the project. Or maybe you found a recent grad who just needs money to live while they search for a job. Either way - don't expect this.

Most customers are looking for somebody to work with them for 15+ hours planning the project, giving relevant insight (like what designs work well for what demographic etc.), and estimating costs/schedule. That is why designers don't normally bill hourly. Many of my customers when I freelanced were billed more for time spent in meetings with them than for actual work, mostly on $2,000+ projects.

My recommendation is this: If you want a good designer, stop trying to do the work yourself and pay somebody who really knows what they are doing to do what they do. The 8-10 hours of your own time spent looking for a deal on a designer is likely more expensive to your company than the $500 extra it would cost you to hire an awesome designer.

There's the $$$ saving aspect, but I've found the biggest benefit is actually the time saving / faster iteration ability. Get a design and wonder what it would look like without the background? That 'what-if' is either two clicks in PS for you... or a day of writing the designer an email, him fitting it into his workflow and sending it back, and you looking at the image.

This also lets you repurpose existing designs for other things (e.g. taking that cool graphic on your website and re-using it on your marketing brochure).

After a few projects you'll have recouped the cost of Photoshop, and you'll have gained a very useful skill.

tl;dr - basic Photoshop skills save you time and money