Your Design Sucks (and Nobody Trusts You)

Editor's Notes

• #2: I’m not here today to debate about the design of your branding, or website, or mobile app or whatever. I’m assuming you’re here today becuase you feel your design does suck and you feel you could improve it. Design if a “feeling” that evokes trust. Trust = conversions.
• #3: Real quick about myself… Started my career as a Designer working for a small web development shop in the Nashville TN area.
• #4: Then took a marketing job working for a nation wide 3B/year company. I was their affiliate marketing manager. There I learned all about the industry and got my feet wet in SEO.
• #5: After my first year at that company, I had a side project that took off, so I left there to focus on our flagship site Vecteezy dot com and the whole Eezy brand.
• #6: We now have a network of about 10 sites. 4 are “Eezy” sites and the rest are stand alone brands.
• #7: and growing quick.
• #8: 14 Team members, 6 of which have design backgrounds.
• #9: At the end of the day, design is still my #1 passion. Every morning I wake up and think about design & marketing & SEO.
• #10: Everyone has different tastes.Who are you to tell me that I should use the color blue for my air conditioning repair lead gen pages? My corporate colors are red and orange!
• #12: In reality there are many design “standards” that are objective.
• #13: For the most part, many designers treat design as “art”. They are picky and choosy on what jobs they accept and they want to charge you a bazillion dollars for it. But I’m going to show you how to find designers that don’t do that.
• #14: This is where we begin…
• #15: Dribbble is the the largest community of designers that I’m aware of who are actively showing off their work in an effort to get more work. It’s a treasure trove of amazing designers who are available to be hired. But how?
• #16: You need a Pro membership to use their search tool. It’s $20 per year and worth every penny.
• #17: Start by selecting Popular to get the guys who have the most high quality work uploaded to the site. If you select “Latest” you may get some new guys that don’t have much work uploaded yet and it may be too hard to tell if they’re any good.
• #18: Don’t select “Design Teams” becuase if you do, you’ll get a agency which is typically more expensive.
• #19: If I’m looking for a page layout, then I always start with the most broad term like “Web Design”. If I’m looking for logos I’ll type in “Logo Design” or whatever. This isn’t always perfect so it’s always best to perform multiple searches for different skills to find someone good. Now for the location. This is where the money is…
• #20: Does anyone know what this paint splat is?
• #21: Indonesia for some reason is churning out some of the best designers I’ve seen in a while. I’m not entirely sure how or why, but they are the some of the best and most affordable in the industry right now. The cost of living is so crazy low in Indonesia yet the produce a high amount of very good Graphic Designers, so it’s great for people like us. Also…
• #22: I think this is one of the best kept secrets in the design space right now and as soon as word gets out, these guys won’t be as available to us. Let’s just keep this out little secret for now.
• #23: So start with Indonesia and start looking for Designers who have created projects similar to yours.
• #24: For example if you’re looking for a new home page design, then search for “home page designs”. If you’re looking for a new logo, then search for logos. Don’t contact someone who has a lot of nice logos and expect them to create a nice landing page.
• #25: Don’t get sucked in by the beautiful work. EVERYTHING looks good on Dribbble at first glance. But just because a designer can create a beautiful logo, doesn’t mean they can create a beautiful page layout or vise versa. Don’t get sucked in. Find what a project similar to yours. Make sure that designer is a pro and then reach out.
• #26: It’s an important question.
• #27: I’ll show you two main things that I look for…
• #28: Here is a perfect example. This designer’s portfolio looked pretty good. But you need to be able to to tell the difference between a Rookie and a Pro.  How do you tell the difference? Look at the details. Here’s a perfect example. Looks pretty good right?
• #29: See these red lines? That is to show you the alignment. This designer didn’t left align his elements. That is a detail that a more professional designer would notice. This guy is amateur hour. Move along. Find someone else.
• #30: Lower down on that page is a bunch of buttons the designer created. Looks pretty standard right? Look closer…
• #31: The padding on either side of those buttons is not the same. It’s 35px on the left and 41px on the right. Some of you might be saying “oh thats not a big deal, the programmer will fix that in the code”. But the truth is that is a tell-tale sign of an amateur designer. If they are an amateur, then when you get them a difficult project, they won’t be able to find good design solutions to your problems.
• #32: Ok once you have found about 10 good designers, it’s time to start emailing them.
• #33: Of course when you begin your outreach make sure you experiment for your copy to figure out which gets the best responses. You want to keep it short and simple and to the point. Don’t overwhelm them with details. Your main goal is to get a response regarding pricing. Here is an example of how I would send mine…
• #34: Complement them on a previous design they’ve done. This is important. They are trying to stand out from the crowd in a sea of designers. Letting them know you noticed them and liked what they did will go a really long way. Link to the work you like for reference so you can tell them you want something similar to that but then list out all the ways it needs to change. You may also want to ask how quickly they can have it done by, but thats not always necessary on the first email. Rinse and repeat 10x
• #35: Once you start getting responses, you should be looking for designers you give you a set price. For a single page mockup it should come back anywhere in the $80 - $200 range depending on the level of detail you need. Anything lower and watch out for quality issues. Anything higher and you’re probably over paying.
• #36: If they respond back and give you an hourly rate… move along. They are not incentivized to get your design completed. *Caveat* If you can’t find anyone else, and your #1 designer you like responds back with an hourly rate, then you can ask them how many hours they think they will need to complete your project and you can get an idea about price this way.
• #37: If they want to know your budget, they are trying to figure out how much they can charge you (as much as possible). Move along…
• #38: If they ask you more than a few questions then watch out. They may not understand what you want (assuming you gave them clear instructions and provided examples) and it will just cause more problems further along in the project. Move along.
• #39: If you don’t get any responses you like, you may also want to try searching other countries. Here’s how I’d do it… Start in Europe and order by cheapest cost of living first. Google “EU cost of living by country”
• #40: This is the type of response you should expect…
• #41: Sweet.
• #42: Congratulations on finding a designer. If you’re like me and you have multiple projects going on at any given time, then you’ll need a better system than email to manage the tasks and revisions within the tasks.
• #43: Say hello to Trello. It’s free and it’s awesome.
• #44: Back in the day software developers used to use sticky notes to stay organized. They’d write each task on a sticky note. When they were beginning a task they’d gab it off the top of the “To Do” column and move it over to the “Doing” column. When they were done, they’d move it over again. Thats what Trello is. It’s a digital version of sticky notes to help you stay organized.
• #45: Here’s what my design board looks like right now.
• #46: All ideas and long term things I want designed get put into the backlog. If I get an idea of of something I *think* I might want designed down the road, I put it in the backlog.
• #47: The Priority Queue is for ideas that have been fully written out and documented for the designer.
• #48: Once the designer is ready to go, they grab the ticket from the top of the Priority Queue and drag it over to “In Progress”. Thats how I know what designs are actively being worked on at any given time.
• #49: Once the designer is “done” their task and would like to show it to you, they pull the card over to the “Ready for Review” column. They can upload attachments and leave comments directly within the card so all conversations about that specific design are contained within that card. If revisions are requested, I leave them as a comment or an ordered list within that card and drag it back over to the top of the “In Progress” list.
• #50: Once the designer and myself have agreed on the design, they upload the final artwork to the card. Once I have received the final artwork, I then drag the card over to the “Ready to Invoice” list and the designer sends me the invoice.
• #51: Once we have paid the invoice I drag the card over to the “Invoice Paid” list. From here I can then move the card over to the development board for the programmers to start building out the designs.
• #52: Trello is completely customizable so you can create different boards for different types of projects. Here is a screenshot of one they have on their home page for a kitchen redesign.
• #53: To summarize…