Where I work, we have a variety of Rails projects, small, medium, and large, in the works. We lack strong front-end skills and definitely strong design skills. On the one hand, we can try to level up on our team, but there is also a “knack” to some of these things that we lack, and I’d love to have a real pro to talk to.
Often we just drop in some vanilla bootstrap stuff, thinking that someday we will polish it, but that usually does not happen.
Ok, so I have one particular case of a small rails app that has all the moving parts in place, but it needs a decent design and also someone to apply that design to all the layouts / views. Where do you go to find someone who can do this kind of work? It is truly the missing piece of our team’s pie, and I’d love to know what any of you all are doing, or how much time this usually takes (costs!), etc.
Look for someone that started out on the front end. When I first started learning rails the asset pipeline and front end design was the first thing that I completely understood because of my background.
Freelance rates vary and the amount of time it takes to skin an app depends on a lot of factors. You can save some time by using a front end framework and overriding the default styles. Do you want it to be responsive? Should some actions / view not be available on mobile? I could go on and on.
My advice is to find someone who really digs CSS and knows how to organise your code for maintainability. It becomes a real pain very fast (meaning it will become harder and harder to maintain) if you’re adding styles all over the place. Another thing to keep in mind is that CSS will slowly but surely grow (in file size) simply because you don’t know what is safe to remove.