At work we’re looking to hire a designer to help us with the user interface for our forthcoming1, open source2, web-based CRM tool. (where we define CRM as “Community Relationship Management”)

Ideally we’d like to hire someone (or someones) for the full process: a round of usability feedback on our current prototypes, graphic design help to smooth and polish the prototypes into something visually pleasing, and coding help to build pure CSS/XHTML, cross browser accessible templates.

However the budget is a bit tighter then that, so we tried to hone it down, laying out the key project objectives, focusing primarily on where we need the most help – graphic design.

If all goes well people are going to spend several hours a day living in this tool, sorting, editing, and managing tables and tables of data, not to mention a number of complex interactions. It needs to be fast (CSS, light on images), and it needs to be gentle on the eyes (aesthetic, good use of whitespace).

One way to put it is we’re looking for someone who can do the data-centric equivalent of UnDesign.

So please if you know someone how does this kind of design, and is interested in getting paid to do some short term work on an open source project serving non-profits, have them get in touch.

For more details see the official blog entry, and the RFP (it’s a .doc, but opens fine in OOo. For a rough sense of it, also available as text, quick and dirst conversion courtesy of antiword.)

1 Early Fall with any luck.

2 PHP5/MySQL/AGPL.