Go, minimal

After getting filing the paperwork, writing a bunch of text, and getting business cards, Simande needed a website. This was before we had our amazingly talented designer come on board so we turned to Craigslist.  I know CL isn’t the best place to find the world’s most amazing design talent and that there are other, more designer specific, places to look (like AIGA, Creative Hotlist, Freelance Switch), but the results were completely underwhelming.

First of all, I was amazed at how fast some people responded.  It felt like they just sat around all day refreshing Craigslist and sending their sucky form letter to every new post immediately.  My advice would be to throw out all the replies you get within the first 20 minutes because they’re too busy spamming people to be working on their craft.  I did the due diligence of going through every email and clicking each portfolio link.  If there was no link I just trashed it immediately, because who wants to hire a web designer without a website?  Out of the 153 replies I received, there were only 3 that I would consider using (that’s a 1.96% signal-to-noise ratio).  They each charged between $1500-$2500 for a logo design that includes a couple of concepts (3-5) and then 3 rounds of revisions based on one of those concepts.  By that time, I was so frustrated by the amount of horrible design work out there that I decided to try my hand at it.  The hilarious results will be in the next part of the series.