We've done pieces ourselves, and...

http://www.madebysofa.com/ - Cappuccino logo at http://cappuccino.org

http://metalabdesign.com/ - splash page for http://280slides.com and http://280north.com

http://cocoagrove.com/ - 280 Slides logo and some of the graphical elements in 280 Slides

I was going to ask you who did the icon for cappucino. It looks great. Thanks for sharing.

I agree, the Cappucino logo is hot. (Couldn't resist.)

Seriously, though, the 280 North website looks great.

Actually, I'm going to dissent and say I'm not wild about the Cappuccino logo: it's too complex. Look at the small version:

http://cappuccino.org/images/cappuccino-small.png

It loses any sense of what it is, unless you already know. The larger version on the site is quite pretty, but I'm just not sure it works great as a logo. Logos should still be very clear and recognizable even when degraded a lot (size, lack of colors, etc...).

the cappuccino one fails all of my criteria for being a good logo also. nice graphic but not a logo or an icon at the size it is used at.

I cant thank you enough for those links!!!

Very much a fan of your work!

is that to say something about these companies that you didn't re-use them again?

I'm using the free Silk icons from http://famfamfam.com/ -- they're pretty popular, a lot of apps use them.

Silk is a solid set, but it's becoming extremely noticeable when it's used. Now it really seems jarring when I see it on a site: it looks skimpy.

It's great for placeholders, but if you can get professional design work done, do it. Don't skip on expenses if it means looking more unique.

For icons I've been using the Crystal set by Everaldo, released under LGPL.

http://www.everaldo.com/crystal/

I have a particular dislike for that icon set. Things that are shiny are too shiny and things that aren’t shiny look flat. It also has a bad case of Apple envy; but is nowhere near up to the OS X icons’ standard.

Agreed. There are better LGPL sets. We mostly use Nuvola by David Vignoni, though I've grown a little tired of its cartoonish looks, and David has since done better work (but none as complete as Nuvola...we paid for development of a couple dozen of the Nuvola set, so it's complete in ways that no other is for our purposes).

Do you know of any more sets like this?

The thing about the Apple icons is that they're all surprisingly well thought-out. Despite the general joke, they've very rarely overshiny and that gives them a really nice, solid feel. Things like the default Leopard folder and the TextEdit icon are entirely non-shiny. So when people aim to out-Apple Apple, it feels overdone, like this icon set in particular.

Well, I can tell you where NOT to go:

When I first setup http://chesstr.com I tried one of the larger, "get a logo for only $150" firms. Needless to say, I was tremendously disappointed. First, my website name was misspelled in a few of the mockups - seriously, how do you manage to misspell 'chess'?

I also felt very pressured to select my logo from a handful of rather bland options ("make your selection so we can wrap things up"). They made some claim about 100% satisfaction, but I was so frustrated and displeased I just walked away - $150 bucks down the drain.

I ended up just doing it myself with gimp. It's certainly not very good - but it was better than the alternatives. B latent plug, anyone have any good logo ideas for a chess website? :)

I could design one if you're serious. would you like to stay with the knight theme? or could you go in other directions. i dont think your current is horrible though.

try 99 designs.com for a logo design. There seems to be some good talent there.

typography. it's not the only thing a good designer knows, but it's a basic skill that the good ones respect.

there are 2 schools of design that a savage like me can comprehend: systemic and emotional. i'm sure that many can argue for the many gradations, but these are the important distinctions/extremes to recognize. that said, it's not either or - successful designers evoke (that's an important word- what does your potential designer's portfolio evoke) their ideas in a consistent/lasting manner. this requires both schools of thought - powerful ideas that can be repeated/propagated.

emotional design is provocation. vimeo is better at this than google - compare the persistent vimeo login page with the occasional google holiday logo. that said, there's a much wider range of emotions that neither of these places touch. good emotional graphic designers will understand how to communicate your product evoking a positive emotional response.

systemic graphic design is the ability to maintain an identity, consistently, and create familiarity. most of us feel that if we were hired as a brand manager for google, we'd have a pretty good sense of whether or not a page put in front of us meets their identity's requirements. that's a test to remember. more than any one event in your brand's lifecycle, systemic graphic design will be there to give you a (relatively) easy solution in any situation, once your voice has been defined. best example in a typeface: helvetica. these designers demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of systems design. look at Paul Rand's work & Josef Müller-Brockmann to see evidence of a system that's designed to be familiar, even when it's radical.

ideally, you need both. an easy metric that would hold up against the best ones i know (and no, i won't release their names, they're busy ;) - they love to talk about their art and they will not hesitate to tackle a new challenge, especially if it seems hard. even at the expense of dayjobs & prior commitments. then, give them space. when ideas seem ethereal, be very clear on your business requirements, but let them solve the problem/bring it back to earth.

hope this helps. graphic design is half of how i discovered (social) hacking and i can't stress its importance enough - it's a useful field to learn about, not just depend on.

Can you find someone from a local college or Craigslist to build Google? Prolly not. Same goes for Vimeo's design. It may seem really simple and easy in appearance, but that's the result of clever design, not chance.

It's really hard to hire a talented creative director if you know nothing about design. You may want to consider working with a design studio for now, just to learn the ropes and gain a higher appreciation. Poke around design award websites or places like deviantart.com to find one.

Must be why it doesn't load correctly in FireFox?

We got the http://www.bionicbooks.com logo by posting a project on http://www.crowdspring.com

Some simple stuff I do myself. For the more complicated stuff I started out with using digital point...but then I switched to http://99designs.com/ and haven't looked back. You get way more submissions so you have a much higher chance of getting something truly good.

We used 99designs just recently for logo work for www.neighborex.com. Was a great experience. Designers were easy to work with. Process was simple and painless.

How much did a logo like that cost you at 99? If you don't mind me asking...

We've done two logos at 99designs now. I blogged about the experience in a couple of places...with the winning entry being discussed here:

http://inthebox.webmin.com/the-new-face-of-webmin

We used a prize of $500 for each logo. In both cases, it was the highest paying contest on the site when started. In the second case, a $750 contest started soon after, but it didn't seem to impact our results negatively. The cost of running a contest is $39 (it was only $30 when we first used them).

99Designs charged a fee in teh neighborhood of $35 and we paid $200 to the winning designer.

This is a great question and there is no easy answer. I was also on the same page as to having a really amazing design for our app/start (Mugasha.com). I am not a designer myself, I am developer/UI/UX guy although, I have an appreciation for good design ethics. There are two ways to go about it, One is what 280North did and hire these mini-studios. They are great, focused and quite talented. Make sure its a mini one, big ones are not very focused. The second is the path I choose and found a designer in our local are through networking and events and made him a partner. This is tough, I am giving away a quarter of my company to a designer who I trust. I am also making him responsible and take ownership of the design and UI. Its a collaborative effort in the end but the best thing to do would be to hire someone who is good and who you can trust.

I do a lot of development in Java, Java Server Faces specifically. We used RichFaces which comes with some slick templates and modules. We added FamFamFam silk icons, used JFreeChart for charts and some scriptaculous for transitions and effects, and the whole thing came out looking great.

This may be off topic, but I think part of is it the graphics, and part of it is the AJAX "feel". By that I mean, even though Google Reader and GMail are AJAX apps, they don't "look" like it. I think that is kind of the point though: they're functional, and they don't get in the way. We used lightbox type effects, loading buttons and drop downs sparingly, to really enhance the user's experience.

I tried local colleges (http://www.academyart.edu/) but found the rates the students want to charge as much as the more experienced designers though they had much thinner portfolios.

So far all the designers I've hired have been through recommendations of friends and they've worked out well so far.

For logo design (yes, I realize a bit off topic) I recommend http://www.designoutpost.com

I've been designing since I had to pack up my art supplies when I moved at 14. http://sicret.net has some of my work, though less of my recent stuff which is more based on typography and establishing a well-constructed grid.grid.

While I am working on my own startups, I'm also a university student and need to pay the bills through freelancing.

I still think it's best to hire full time designers then going to an outside firm. I am biased because I am a user interface designer for startups. But I think working on something full time lets you understand the application much better.

Probably getting a designer from eLance/Craigslist may be relatively easier, but finding a guy to do overall UX design may be hard to find. I am looking for one myself, without any luck.

Find people on smashingmagazine.com (their gigs section)

You could run a design competition at 99designs.com.

You would then follow-up with the winner if you needed any extra work.

Understanding how Photoshop works and being able to make some graphics does not mean you will be able to design a usable web app. It takes practice - just like programming.

Not only that, it takes talent. I've been doing HTML/CSS for years, and I still have no idea how to design something great, because I can't visualize what I want -- I only know what I like or don't like after I see it.

That's how I seem to be:- I can create nice elements of a design, but it always comes together to look out of place. The group I work with have a designer in our team who handles design for all our web apps.

Not everyone has time to spend learning how to use photoshop. I'd rather spend 500 bucks to get someone to do it for me than to spend two weeks trying to do it myself. I could make much more than 500 doing the stuff I know in those two weeks.

Exactly - let the professionals do what they can. I am a designer and I could learn how to code a site in Rails or Python, or whatever, in a few weeks but the code would be a mess and the site wouldn't be optimized and I'd waste a ton of time figuring all that out later.

I'd rather pay someone who knows what they're doing and can do it right the first time.

The easier it looks, the harder it is. If clean aesthetic was that easy, there would be more Apple's and fewer poor attempts. But there's not.

That said, let's see some links to your work. :)

His web design work is fairly nice: http://www.streetread.com/about http://www.tweako.com/ Not that this means much to his argument, but still interesting...

i didnt mean anything bad by it at all. i feel having design skills on top of development is huge. especially since im sure there will be plenty more apps down the line - design costs can add up quickly. plus if you do the design yourself you can constantly change it when you want which i find to be really important.

spending a few days looking over simple css and photoshop tutorials can go a long way. most web graphics dont require much photoshoping - just basic techniques.

thanks for the compliments. tweako is hidious - it was an overnight design. streetread is nice but check out the homepage to get the real effect.