Tags to Richness

A little over a month ago I had a budget to hire freelancers and after settling into a pattern with them, this is how I’m getting value from them.  For this discussion there are essentially two phases to design, the critical thinking phase and the polish phase.  The critical thinking phase deals with mocking and feedback loops until the key ideas are captured in rough drawings.  The polish phase is when the website’s specific aesthetic details get applied to these mocks, like line width, color, margin size, etc.

I’ve found that it’s really fast and easy to get critical thinking from the freelancers, but that the polish will take a significant investment of time and energy in the freelancer before they are where I need them.  The issue has been that because I have a limited freelancer budget and because the freelancers tend to have day jobs I end up only getting 2-10 hours a week of their time at most.  For now I’ve found it’s more valuable to keep them cranking out critical thinking in the form of mocks while internally we apply the polish.

This method is similar to how Mike Shinoda describes Linkin Park’s album creation process.

In the new version of our process we’re no longer making albums and then touring and then starting from scratch and making new albums we are just writing all the time so that is to say when we’ve got a collection of songs we think is an album we release it

Like Linkin Park, I am having my freelancers create a pool of fleshed out ideas.  And when the various priorities align I can easily take one, apply the polish and hand it off to the development team.

(Quote Source: Meeting of a Thousand Suns (Video Documentary) on the iTunes A Thousand Suns (Deluxe Version) LP)