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I don't really think they are obligated to describe to you how they make the sausage.

As long as the end result is what you paid for, does it really matter if they employ trained professionals, or monkeys with notepad.exe?

I agree, but I think the firm should have just covered all their bases and given her an e-mail at their domain.

Then if it was later discovered that the freelancer wasn't a "real" employee they would be accused of misrepresentation as well. I think that the approach they took was correct, they did not attempt to hide, or call attention to, what exactly the freelancers tax status was.

They could have hired this freelancer the day before as a permanent employee, with an honest for-real @designfirm.com email address and the OP would have been perfectly happy (assuming the outcome as acceptable).

This is a mostly a matter of getting worked up over the formality of which logo is on the paycheck.

Her email address was not out in the open. It took some digging through basecamp for me to figure it out. My main issue was that I looked through the portfolio of the person they were going to have to do it and she wasn't any good.

I also didn't really think it was worth letting her attempt to do it and then fighting them at the end of I wasn't happy.

Ahh. Interesting bit of clarification. In either case, it's hard to argue as everything is theoretical at this point. Maybe they could not have justified taking on your project at all if they didn't farm it out to this freelancer.

So, for your budget (and I'm way over simplifying here) you could have gone elsewhere and gotten work more or less of the caliber of this person working through a lesser firm, or gone to this name-brand firm where the work would not have been done by an a-lister, but the project management and creative oversight would have been handled by them. Theoretically, they would have ensured an outcome on-par with their reputation, even if they potentially had to do some internal re-work if her output wasn't up to snuff.

This sounds, to me, like the scenario where the design firm was trying to expand their business a little bit and was doing so on a trial basis, with you and her both effectively as guinea pigs. I've seen this work really well and really poorly. If their signature is at the point where it can be easily reproduced under guidance, then you missed a good opportunity. If their style cannot be implemented by anyone other than these 4 or 5 people, you got lucky.

If I had to flip a coin though, I'm guessing you gave up a good opportunity here...

You'd be surprised what people with any talent at all can do under the thumb of their betters. I'm with the other responder thinking you likely just missed out.

It's definitely important to know what kind of talent is behind your design project. If I'm paying $30/hr for a small project, I would expect it to be handled by a junior person. But if I'm shelling out $175/hr to the same firm for a larger project, I sure as hell better have their best creative minds on it. Setting explicitly clear expectations is an important part of client work.

Depends on which talent you're REALLY hiring and concerned with. Are you hiring the director/producer, or the staff.

Provided that the project got proper oversight and herding by the creative director, it does not really matter, IMO, who writes the HTML and diddles the Photoshop buttons.

I've worked with 1-person shops and with large, well known firms, and this notion that creative directors are calling the shots on projects doesn't square with my experience. The person who's performance you care about is the one giving you comps and taking your feedback on them; in firms with "directors", that person is almost never the director.

Even if you don't have the "no unapproved subs" clause in your contract --- which, put it there --- it's still a marketplace, and not knowing who's going to staff your project, or even that they're FT employees, is a major misfeature of a consulting firm.

Nobody owes "working on crappy terms" to any consulting firm. Pick one you trust.

I don't think they were wrong or that you overreacted.

The thing about design firms that have a very distinctive look is that they have probably taken the time to refine and largely automate the design process (Photoshop actions, etc.) Take for example Metalab (which I would guess is who you hired, as they immediately came to mind as fitting this mold): all their work looks nearly exactly the same; I can spot one of their sites on first glance. When you have as refined a style and spec as they do, you can probably get freelancers to make you designs which conform to the spec pretty well.

The bottom line is that companies like them (not saying they do this because I don't know, but it's as good an example as any) don't make money by doing crappy work; they make it by sticking to a token style. If they can get somebody to duplicate that style using their tools and guidance for cheaper than they pay employees, why wouldn't they? You get what you wanted and they make more money -- everybody wins.

You're entitled to react however you like, obviously. If you wanted a staff member and would feel unsafe about using a freelancer, that's your prerogative. My point is simply that the company probably arranges it such that it doesn't matter in the long run (except to their profit margin).

Yes. Fire them.

When you do contracts next time, include a clause that says subcontractors aren't allowed without prior approval. That's standard in the industry I work in, and subcontractors are a fact of life here.

Meanwhile, it doesn't matter who's right and who's wrong. It is a sensible business decision to work with firms who will staff projects predictably and, preferably, with their own people. There are enough good web design firms in the world that you shouldn't be compromising.

In some cases, you might benefit from being staffed with a sub; maybe the sub was a former partner, or a rock star they're actively trying to recruit onto the team. In those cases, that benefit should have been sold to you at project start. The fact that you didn't even know who would be working on the project until it kicked off tells me you could find a better firm to work with.

I don't think you overreacted. I would find it difficult to trust a consultant who pulled a bait-and-switch on me.

An alternative to firing them might have been to re-negotiate their fees based on the less known designer, or to defer payment until the job was finished to your satisfaction.

But given the breach of trust, I don't think canceling the contract was out of line. Especially if staying with them would require extra oversight and heartburn.

He didn't hire a consultant. He hired a consulting company. BIG difference.

It shouldn't be. Plenty of up-and-up companies subcontract, but they tell you that sooner than the day the project kicks off.

You'd be surprised how common that is.

The same thing has happened to me and I didn't know until after the project was over. In the end, as long as your happy with the design it shouldn't matter who worked on it. That being said, stopping the project is def. within your rights since you're the client :)

Yep, you're within your rights to panic and flee.

And, yep, you may have overreacted. Companies subcontract work. That's what they do. Among other things, this is how firms train and audition new people -- by hiring them as subcontractors.

If you pay Company X for the work, you get work with Company X's name on it. If something goes wrong, you get to blame the whole company -- they don't get to dodge the blame by passing it on to their subcontractor. But, in return, you shouldn't expect the right to micromanage the internal affairs of the company.

Of course, it's also possible that you dodged a bullet. Who knows? If the contractor couldn't convince you to stay on as a client, using arguments like the ones above, that might be a sign that you weren't likely to get along well together. Client-contractor relationships are a tricky business. Often you are required to make gut-level decisions.

I cannot upvote this hard enough.

It is purely a tax decision on how this person is hired. If they worked there as a w-2 employee, would the OP be similarly hand wringing?

Contract to Hire is a very normal way to hire. Subcontracting at least SOME of the work is actually a sign of specialization, and can create much better work then just doing everything in house.

The OP has no idea how the style he likes so much was actually created. It could have been created by a Slovakian national working on an internship for all he knows

If you want quality signoff agreements, then make those. Don't get all scared the first time you find one part of the project is not 100% done by staff that's been there for decades. It's a company. It hires people. That's what makes a company different than a freelancer.

It's not purely a tax decision. Staff gets fired when they screw up. Contractors just don't get re-upped. Staff have a 1:1 relationship with the company. Contractors have a 1:N relationship. When they don't get re-upped, they take more hours elsewhere.

This is really common in the design world, especially in this crappy economy. Design firms don't have steady demand right now, and a lot of them have laid off former full-time designers, only to pull them back in on contract when work comes through the door. I have friends who are/were in exactly this situation.

I think you probably overreacted. Why don't you trust the professional designers to choose their employees? What does the employee's tax status have to do with the designs they deliver?

You overreacted.

If you want quality guarantees, make those.

If you want a certain style, specify that.

Otherwise, calm down, breath easy, and be aware that companies sometimes hire people. Actually, that's pretty much the definitive factor between hiring a company and hiring a freelancer: The company is made up of multiple people, some of which you may not know.

You hire a design firm because you like their portfolio work. As a client, you shouldn't have to ask if the same people responsible for the portfolio work are going to work on your project. My guess is that this is an assumption that most clients will make (I certainly would), so it certainly seems that their actions are a bit disingenuous.

I don't think the OP has any idea what amount of work the non-outsourced people in the project would be doing. For all he knows, the style he's talking about is the only thing the non-outsourced people ever do, and the rest are all code monkeys who do all the grunt work.

If you hire a company, and like their output, you're very likely overreacting if you find out they outsource regularly after signing on the dotted line. I mean, you know that 1/2 the stuff you get in a restaurant is created in factories, frozen then shipped there, right? Or is that fraud because everything wasn't created on premises.

In addition - this design firm put out a ad the day before my project started looking for a new designer. If this person was so good, why didn't they just fill that job?

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