Hiring a designer
We want the skedsheet website, logo, and the software to look nice. Maybe nice isn’t even the right word – we want the design to be “not horrible”. We know we don’t have great aesthetic skills or the vocabulary to describe design, but we’ve got strong opinions about what we like and what we don’t.
It seems like a great opportunity to hire a designer to do work for us. Although we’ve used freelance designers through sites like elance.com, this time I thought it would be nice to find someone that we can build an ongoing relationship with. So through a friend of a friend, I found someone with what looks like they have a compatible design sensibility, and the skills to actually do the work.
Here’s what we’re thinking, we’ll see if the results we get meet what we have in mind. The adjectives that come to mind when I try to describe what we want are minimal, clean, rounded corners, and playful.
Logo - want something very typographic. Maybe just the name skedsheet in a distinctive font & color. We probably also want an icon; mostly to use as a favorite icon in the browser. I guess saying “web 2.0” is pretty broad, but there’s a certain style that people think of, and I tend to like it.
Website - we want a website that coordinates with the logo colors and font. In the past, we’ve worked with designers who simply slap our logo onto an existing template, for very cheesy result.
Here are some of the other sites I like, in random order, with my weak critiques.
- http://getdropbox.com (a bit sparse).
- http://ididwork.com (header bugs me)
- http://www.delicious-monster.com/ (very design-y, but cool)
- http://www.twiddla.com (would like a bit more color)
- http://www.panic.com/ (a little too abstract)
After we get the first swag at a design, I hope we can do more, too:
- Coordinating wordpress template
- Coordinating style in skedsheet
- Online forum with same style
- Business cards, other print stuff?
So, is this amount of description enough to get an awesome result? We’ll see.
