Long: I'm a developer (I do everything from server management to psd to template to html to php to ruby etc), 6 years in office experience (London, Hoxton), around 4 years freelance. Since I started working freelance, I wanted to have a good designer as my go-to person, could find someone reliable and good enough for my standards. So I made my girlfriend who was always good at drawing (fresh out of uni with an unrelated masters at the time) learn photoshop, illustrator and a few other tools. She's ace with vector graphics, her psd/ai files are a pleasure to work with, she's creative and intelligent (I'm biased, but seriously). I actually managed to pull it off and make her a good designer for a developer to work with.
This worked well for us, for the last 2 years, she would help me out when I needed her and find work via Elance when I didn't need any design services.
In the last few months, I've been focusing more on optimising and reworking existing applications, making them faster and more efficient for my ongoing clients, so I haven't needed a designer for a while and about a week ago, Elance closed her account out of the blue, her feedback was flawless, great ratings, top 10% on lots of tests. We tried emailing them a few times, but after googling and finding out that they just drop hordes of accounts from time to time we understood that it's a complete waste of time.
So I ask you HN, where could I point her? I feel as a failed partner for having her change the course of her professional career and now seeing it come to a very abrupt stop.
