ubaidabcd

Has anybody noticed that some of the graphic designers out there seems are using a portfolio that they didn't create to promote their service and then you get their work and it's stock photos with some font that you can make in MS Paint.

I tried to hire a graphic designer from rent-a-coder, it's a good thing they have escrow. I won the arbritration easily, his portfolio had all these really good designs that looked like Web 2.0 type stuff really clean and the graphics and fonts were illustrated.

What I got was stock photos with a title in Times New Roman in dark orange shading.

I hired somebody else recently to do some work, and while the job was not exceptional and identical to the work in his portfolio, for the price it wasn't a bad deal and the work was not bad.

Does anybody have any advise how to advise these types of situations in the future? I suppose nothing you can really go except to a place like rent-a-coder so your funds are in escrow and just go with the user ratings. Even if you see exceptional work but they haven't been there long enough or nobody has been able to review their work then don't go with them.

DaveEMG

Just remember, you get what you pay for. It's true in almost every aspect of you life, graphic design especially.

Try Sitepoint. I've had good success there for small project work.

__________________
"If you ain't first you're last..." ... "Oh hell, Son, I was high that day. That doesn't make any sense at all, you can be second, third, fourth... hell you can even be fifth."

Jondoe0069

I wouldn't even put the $ into escrow until I saw a mockup.

__________________
(#)(#)

ubaidabcd

Yeah, that's what I initially tried to do, but most everybody wouldn't agree to it. I only went with this particular persons work due to their "portfolio." I'll just have to keep trying to find somebody until they can offer an initial mock up.

Supergeek

Actually, it's not really fair to make a (legitimate) designer put hours of his time into a project with no committment from you. Designers get ripped off, too, and working for free is a ripoff. In this case, you ran into a bad egg, but you can't penalize an entire industry because of some bad people.

Escrow is a good solution to this; don't trivialize a designer's time over your own.

DaveEMG

Don't bother with Escrow, just focus on only working with graphic designers with legitimate referrals. If there's any question ahead of time about the accuracy of their portfolio, ask them for a list of 3-4 previous clients that you can contact to verify their quality of work.

If they can't provide referrals or give you a list of clients that are happy to talk about them, you don't want to hire them anyways.

__________________
"If you ain't first you're last..." ... "Oh hell, Son, I was high that day. That doesn't make any sense at all, you can be second, third, fourth... hell you can even be fifth."

jenzkc

people overseas can't design, period. unless they're from europe. indians always show a bunch of crap they've stolen from a site like template monster.