The other side of crowdsourcing
transcapitalist.com
transcapitalist.com
I'm a programmer; to me, what designers do, and what they can come up with, is pure magic. I see amazing things all the time that I never could have produced myself. The best I can do is say, "I like this because," or "I don't like this because..."; I certainly haven't the ability to turn out the kind of stuff they do.
As a programmer, I'm not too fond of things like rentacoder, for the same reasons: it tilts the market in a really ugly way. The consumers don't understand the nuances of code, and their primary interest on such sites is price.
So, when I needed a designer, I compromised: I browsed 99designs for a few hours, found a fellow in the UK that had submitted a number of designs that I appreciated, and contacted him privately asking him to name a price for some work.
Hopefully it'll work out. I think using something like 99designs as a portfolio site isn't so bad.
The thing is, to hire a designer, I would need to outsource the 'look and feel' to someone else. I mean, your logo needs to fit with the rest of your site; my logo generated in figlet would look horribly out of place on a web 2.0 'rounded edges' website. Instead, I have found some minimal css that appears to be under an open license, and busted out with 'figlet' for everything else. No rounded boxes, but I certainly have a look that is both unique and consistent. And I find it aesthetically pleasing.
I was tickled pink today by someone on twitter commenting that I was an excellent example of 'niche branding'
He even called me a 'cli webhost' so it sounded like maybe he knows something about advertising or art.
(I mean this in a good way.)