Choosing a Web Design Agency, Choosing Blue Flavor

When I started at Livemocha back in April, we knew from the get-go that we weren't going to even try to design the UI design ourselves. We're a talented group, that's for sure, but sexy and usable graphic design isn't one of those talents. Our original design was ripped from Facebook and comprised of pages and pages of dense copy and functional elements, and Blue Flavor did an amazing job, albeit not without frustration, mostly on their part with us (me, the messenger), at distilling our imprecise and evolving requirements into something that we're proud of.

I spent over 2 weeks "interviewing" potential freelancers and agencies. A couple observations that came out of this exercise:

1. Freelancers are good graphic designers, and good web designers, but it's hard to find a freelancer with good application-type information architecture experience; particularly when you're developing a social app.
   
2. Big agencies such as Zaaz (do a lot of cool work with Converse) and Happy Cog (legendary Jeffrey Zeldman is founder) want you to spend a lot of money up front on "planning" (target customer analysis, branding guidelines), "optimization" (keyword optimized content for SEO), "validation" (user experience and usability testing).

So, what you end up with are freelancer proposals that seem like a lot of money given their experience (they ARE artists after all), and big-agency proposals that will literally take 10x as long as you have and will cost 10x the size of your budget.

The Blue Flavor team were great to work with; though their frustration with us was apparent (and justified, I should emphasize). I had to laugh when Matt (one of the Livemocha devs) forwarded me a Joel on Software blog post that echo'd a similar experience.

Agency to Joel: "but wait, look here, it's right in Basecamp, you said that this design was 'excellent work' and you were 'elated' to have the 'best web design ever in the history of the universe.'"

Joel's post made me feel a lot better since I wasn't the only idiot client in the history of web agency relationships - actually, sounds like I'm a stereotype. Though, I wasn't the only one playing a part: Blue Flavor also uses Basecamp, their offices are across the street from Adobe and the walls are covered with silk-screened music and "web 2.0" posters, and their boardroom table is a ping pong table (an idea which we shamelessly stole for our own office).

Anyway, these guys are rock stars and they were definitely a perfect fit for us. I'm sure we'll use them again once we outgrow our current design. Check out their case study on us - I have some pretty sweet quotes in there (and yes, I'm being sincere and the figures are true).