Anyone knows who the y-comb startups use? Most of them have decent designs and they're on a small budget. What's their secret?

They're all designed by different people. Though in a sense they all use me, since I nag them to fix the more egregious design mistakes.

They're lucky, and you're doing a great nagging job.

I think their secret is that YC deliberately tries to choose founders with a certain design sensibility.

I've noticed this, too.

Wufoo are famously good, and Kevin does all of that work. SocialMoth/Overhear.us have awesome design and Evan does everything. iminlikewithyou.com is tasty (if a bit overly pretty), and I believe they do it in-house, as well. Reddit is great and clean, and Alexis and Steve designed it.

Everyone is swayed by a nice clean design, even technically savvy folks like YC (they also know that a good design can make a good product great, and with bad design the best product will probably fail--MySpace being an obvious and baffling exception to that rule).

I use elance.com. I post my projects there and they bid.

First, use a web designer, not a graphics/print designer. You won't regret it.

You can try sites like CreativeHotLink.com or Craigslist.org

That's what I meant. Corrected the title.

I've had poor luck with elance. The quality just hasn't been very high.

Had a similar experience with elance. So how did you end up doing it? In house?

Ive used these guys. Low cost, solid quality.

http://monvia.com/

How is that a design firm? From their homepage: MonVia is a business and technology accelerator built by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs.

And the "What we do" page only mentions design in passing: http://monvia.com/whatwedo.html

Given what they claim to do, who frequents news.yc, the fact that this is your only comment (or post) and how out of context this recommendation seems to be, you're setting off some serious spam flags. Assuming you deserve the benefit of the doubt : Care to clarify or point us to their web design wing?

Their web site looks nice, but they seem expensive!!! What's "Low Cost" to you? Ballpark figure? I know some companies charge thousands of dollars, and that's beyond my budget.