Tags to Richness

Recently I was given a small budget to hire some freelancers to help with the large backlog of design tasks we have.  Below are some of the steps I used to find the right people.

1. Posted on a design specific job board

I ignored the general job boards like workforce services, craigslist, hotjobs or monster.  I went straight to authenticjobs.com, a very well known job board in the design community.  My second and third choices would have been jobs.37signals.com and krop.com.

2. 30 seconds and three folders: Yes, No, Maybe

I didn’t read the emails I received.  Instead I scanned them for a link to a portfolio.  Obviously if there wasn’t a link to a portfolio I threw the email in the No folder.  If there was a portfolio link I clicked through and could tell within 30 seconds of looking at their work samples if this was a Yes, No or Maybe.

3. First paid task is a test

You really don’t know what someone is going to be like and what their skill is until they actually do a job for you.  So I would hand the freelancer I was considering their first task, paid of course, and the result would tell me what I was getting into.  If the result was so-so I might ask for a second task and decide from there whether to keep them or move on.

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)