Need some tips on hiring a designer. What to look for, pricing tips, etc.

My buddy and I are working on a passion project in our free time. The goal is really just to break even - but we want to be successful and at least pay for the servers it's going to take to run + one celebratory beer. We've decided to throw $2k at the project to get it bootstrapped, consulted, marketed, etc. I'm doing all the development work, I'm a software engineer by trade so that's easy peazy, but we have very limited design skills.

This leads to my questions. We don't have a name. We have a really good idea for something we want to build, and we can do the building ourselves. But we blow at naming. We blow at branding. We blow at design. Every name we come up with really does suck. And we aren't top notch at logo design either - I tried, my 15 month daughter finger painting does a better job.

From our $2k budget, we want to set aside some for marketing (low amount), and some for professional design help. I've been on a couple of designer for hire sites (crew.co being my favorite) and have found a couple of designers I really like, but I'm finding I don't know how to talk to them, what to ask for, if I'm getting ripped off, etc.

So any tips for the following needs and how to find the right designer at the right price would be greatly appreciated - also know, I have no intention of nickel and diming anyone, I just want to find a fair and reasonable partnership with a designer who meets our needs, and build a relationship that can last a long time - I don't want to find a new designer for every job, I want someone who gets to know us (and we get to know them):

1. We need a name. And we need it to have an available .com TLD
2. We then need a logo that matches the name

That's the basic of what we need right now. I got quoted $1560 from a guy a really like as a flat rate for these 2 items. I THINK it sounds fair, but it does seem like a lot for what I would have assumed was ~20 hours of work. I guess that works out to $78 an hour... is that a fair price for someone fairly new in the design field? What's min/max for a good designer in terms of hourly rate?

For phase 2 of our project here's what I'm thinking:

1. We eventually need a once over of our website UX/UI. I'm pretty OK at web design, especially using standard material design language. But we will want a review and set of suggestions from a professional before doing a full launch in order to make the site feel unique/special/non-generic. I don't need any actual web development, just a review. I assume this is 2-3 hours. Would $150 for something like this be fair?

2. If, and this is a HUGE if, we become successful, any money we make is going to be reinvested in a mobile app for both iOS and Android. I assume this is a $10k+ job. Should the designer and the developer be the same? I was assuming no. So we should plan for what kind of ballpark for a full mobile app design? $5k for the design + $10k for development? Or more for a full mobile app design? What should our maximum, worst case budget look like here?

Thanks everyone for any kind of input. I'm just learning to navigate the design for hire world and appreciate all the advice.

Great design resource

100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices That Matter) Submitted January 05, 2018 at 08:43PM by powertopeople http://ift.tt/2EcOUjz