What is the best way to hire a freelance designer for my project?

We here have http://www.ilocal.nl where you can type in your city and what you’re looking for, and then it lists the companies in your area. Don’t you have something similar there?

Advertise on industry-specific boards like Coroflot, Creative Hotlist, or at AIGA chapters.

Just email me. hehehe.

hire me :D

There are many sites which allow you to post your project and find qualified talent. I would suggest you post your project to these 3 well known freelance job boards:

GetAFreelancer (http://www.getafreelancer.com)
RemoteGurus (http://www.remotegurus.com)
ScriptLance (http://www.scriptlance.com)

When you post your project, the web designers will bid on the project telling you what they’d expect to get paid for the project. You then have the opportunity to select the winning bidder for the project. After selecting the winning bidder you will have the option to place the money for the project into escrow on the site. By placing the money in escrow the web designer will not have access to the money, but will know that you have the money to pay for the project, so they can move forward to complete the project. While money is in escrow you do not have access to it either, so no one gets ripped off. You will only have the option to release the money to the web designer and the web designer will only have the option to cancel the escrow which will release the money back to you. This sophisticated escrow system protects both parties and makes certain the projects gets completed to your satisfication. Only release the money when the project is complete and you are satisified with the final result.

Good luck!

Our agency does a combination of things.
Craigslist (post your job under ‘gigs’) is free. The quality of work is hit or miss but I have found some amazing people on there. Coroflot is good, but I haven’t had much luck with Creative Hotlist. There are some shared job listing boards (http://www.krop.com is a good one…their jobs are ‘shared’ and appear as banner ads on some great design websites) but these require a fee.

One place I would recommend is the Behance Network (http://www.behance.net/). Some of the designers on there are sick talented.

thanks for those answers…very useful!
basically what’s the rate for designing the layout of a web application? let say double complex than this http://fluther.com.

logo+css/xhtml/layout

Here’s one other tips:

ProgrammerMeetDesigner

I haven’t been into any real biddings yet, as I registered yesterday, but it looks nice.

Try http://odesk.com. Lots of good freelancers there.