Good contract user experience and Web designer?

by philg

Folks:

We need to hire a user experience/Web/graphic designer (or just the first two if need be) to assist with (1) a Facebook application (all JavaScript/CSS), (2) an online book design (HTML/CSS), and (3) a corporate site (identity/HTML/CSS).

The budget is low but not India/Pakistan-on-guru.com low. This is probably about 25 hours of work for someone experienced.

Recommendations?

[We’re also interested in hiring someone who is an expert at producing photo-heavy Kindle books.]

6 thoughts on “Good contract user experience and Web designer?”

  1. I’m slightly biased, but can I recommend myself? 🙂 I own a small company specializing in ux/web design/dev for higher-ed, but as a long time fan of your tech, photo, and aviation posts, I’m interested in a side project.

  3. Hi
    I am a graphic and multimedia designer, I specialise in conceptual advertising. Besides my main direct direction I also work with Web design, CRM 2.0 implementation, Internet marketing strategy applications, animation, 3d modelling, 3d animation, corporate identity design, video, photography and almost everything related to multimedia.

    I’m not sure about facebook application but I can help wit online book design and corporate site identity.

    If my skills are something you could use, please don’t hesitate to contact me 🙂

    Best regards,
    Filip Golome.

  4. Hi Phil,
    Would you be targeting browser only, or would you also be targeting EPUB and Kindle?

    I have been developing EPUB 2.0 and Kindle ebooks over the last year for guitar training, which is predominantly music/notation images. The HTML/CSS required for image content is not terribly complex, but I may be able to offer some tips on selecting good image dimensions, some basic GIMP python scripting for batch processing PNG files for auto-crop and scaling, PNG image optimization, and some basic CSS media queries to ensure images resize in the view-port for different orientations.

    I’ve been doing software/web development for about 10 years now, but unfortunately have a full plate at the moment. I would be more than happy to provide any information that may be useful to you. Glad to hear you are still doing software projects 😀

  5. Bob: We had thought about the Kindle and Web projects as entirely separate projects. As far as ebook-publishing we’re happy if it is available through Amazon and looks good on the Kindle. Is there a significant market for ebooks other than on the Kindle?

  6. Hi Phil,
    Personally, I believe there is a good market for EPUBs. I’ve been using Smashwords for EPUB distribution and have had great results over the last 12 months.

    From all of the channels that Smashwords distributes to, I’m seeing about an equal number of sales to Kindle purchases. Most of my sales come from Apple iBooks, then Barnes and Noble, and then “Browse” payouts from Oyster and Scribd. For some markets, people see great results using Amazon KDP Select (I haven’t tested myself), but it requires 90 day exclusive distribution. Of course, depending on the ebook and genre, YMMV.

    If your Web project layout/styling is not too complex, you may not have to separate the projects. An EPUB is basically a website wrapped up in a ZIP container with a manifest. In theory, you may only have to maintain a separate CSS file for the EPUB/Kindle deployment.

    The only headaches that I experienced related to supporting the MOBI format for Kindle on the older Paperwhite (which I own) and DX. These don’t support CSS at all. The KindleGen application attempts to “translate” your CSS into plain HTML (complex CSS selectors usually don’t get translated). I’m not sure if anyone is even supporting them anymore, but the Fire devices and new Paperwhites fully support CSS so you might consider skipping MOBI support.

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