Top 10 Websites For Hiring Freelance Graphic Designer in 2021

Osama Usmani
4 min readMay 2, 2021

Looking for the best freelance graphic designer websites?

While there are tons of freelance websites online, not all of them are great.

That’s why we’ve compiled this list of the top 10 freelance graphic design websites. We’ll highlight each platform’s unique features and walk you through the process of hiring someone from there.

We’ll also give you a few essential tips to keep in mind to further streamline the process!

Here’s what we’ll cover in this article:

The Top 10 Freelance Graphic Designer Websites

Upwork
Freelancer
Fiverr
99designs
Toptal
Guru
PeoplePerHour
Dribbble
TaskShift
DesignHill

How To Ensure That Everything Proceeds Smoothly
Before Finding A Designer
After Finding A Designer

Let’s dive in.

How To Ensure That Everything Proceeds Smoothly
Here are a few helpful tips to streamline the process of hiring and managing a freelance graphic designer:

1. Before Finding A Designer
While the process of finding a designer can be time-consuming, there are a few things that can help you streamline the process:

A. Clearly define your objectives and timeline
Having clearly defined objectives is one of the easiest ways to streamline your hiring proces.

Why?

When you know what you want, it’ll be easier to identify people who are capable of delivering it for you!

Here’s how you do it:

I. Define your goals

What is the scope of your project?

Are you looking for a simple logo design that aligns with your brand identity, or are you looking for an entire set of marketing graphics?

This is going to help you zero-in on freelancers who are skilled in the tasks you need.

II. State your time constraints

How quickly do you want the work to be delivered?

Is it a week, a month — or more?

Keep this in mind when looking at a freelancer’s profile. Most mention their booking availability and usual time for delivery. Choosing one that aligns with your time constraints is a simple way to avoid confusion later on.

B. Clearly define your budget
Establishing your budget before-hand is one of the easiest ways to streamline your hiring process. As you have a set figure in mind, you can avoid platforms that charge high membership fees or commissions on transactions.

Similarly, it’ll help you narrow down your searches when looking for designers. As most of them highlight their usual hourly charges, you can estimate how much they’d charge for your entire project and proceed accordingly.

2. After Finding A Designer
You’ve finally found a designer you like!

But that doesn’t mean your job is done.

Here are a few things to keep in mind once you find a freelance designer:

A. Clearly define scope, deliverables and payment
Before letting a designer start work on your project, you need to be clear about a few things.

Clearly outline:

What their deadline is
The standard of work you expect
The hourly rate of payment
This is going to give them a good idea of how to structure their workload and the amount of time and resources they’ll have to dedicate to your project.

It’s also a good idea to share a detailed project brief with them and if possible, an example of previous work that you’ve liked or published. This will give them a good baseline to build on.

B. Use a monitoring tool to verify quotes
What’s the one problem with hiring freelancers online?

There’s no way for you to verify their quotes!

As you’re not there in person, they could be billing you for time spent watching Netflix shows!

Luckily, performance monitoring tools like Time Doctor can help with this.

What’s Time Doctor?

Time Doctor is a performance monitoring tool used by companies like Apple, PwC and Verizon to monitor their employee’s productivity at work. All you have to do is ask your freelancer to install it and run it whenever they work on your projects.

Here’s how it can help you:

1. Time Doctor has a built-in inactivity tracker that automatically pauses the timer after three minutes of inactivity. This guards against freelancers billing you for idle time.

2. Time Doctor auto-displays a pop-up asking the freelancer if they’re still working whenever they access unproductive websites like YouTube while working. This nudge usually gets them back to work.

Additionally, you’ll have a record of what apps and websites they accessed while working on your project and how long they spent there.

3. With Time Doctor’s projects report, you’ll get an accurate look at how long a project took the freelancer.

4. With Time Doctor’s Payroll feature, you can pay the freelancer directly (if the freelance platform allows you to) using PayPal, Payoneer or another platform of your choice.

Conclusion
Hiring high-quality graphic designers doesn’t have to be difficult.

Just use one of the platforms we listed here, and you’ll easily find a talented designer for your projects. Plus, if you follow the tips we listed here, you’ll have no issues managing your freelancers too!

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