Friday, September 24, 2010

By the Book

Knowing that I need a professional to design the interior of my book, I turned to the website elance.com. This is an interesting site where you post the work you need done, and people then submit proposals to do the work for you. So far I have received 30 responses to the job posting, with bids ranging from $50 to $810. Wow! It was easy to wean out some of them: throwing out the high and the low came first, and because I prefer to deal with someone in the United States I eliminated all the foreign proposals. I also don't want to be someones first elance job, so if they had no jobs posted they came off the list. If the proposal did not contain a portfolio and have good reviews from previous clients, then I threw those out as well.

The next thing I did was look at all the portfolios of those who remained on the list. If the designer had not done projects similar to mine, them they were removed from consideration as well. This might not be the best way to narrow things down, but my book has 160 images (photos and documents) in it. I need to know that the designer can treat those with care and some style.

I now have the list down to 3 possibilities. Of those, one guy is using Creative Suite 4 (CS4) and the others are still working with CS3. The only time this would be an issue is if I (meaning Katie) would want to make any modifications. We have CS5 on our Macs, and the software only allows you to go back one generation in terms of being able to open older documents. I'm not sure that this is a huge deal, but I have emailed Katie for her input. Of course the guy using CS4 is quite a bit more expensive than the other two, so that just adds to my sense of wanting to make the right choice here. I'm willing to pay for his expertise in this matter if it will make a difference down the road.

2 comments:

Mrs. Wryly said...

You are moving along!!

That is an interesting site that I didn't know about.

Unknown said...

Hi Kim. I think your strategy in selecting prospective workers is great. You definitely made the right decisions at the right time. If you want to broaden your search, try vWorker as well. vWorker has a wide selection of CS5 experts on hand.