I've gotten recommendations from several people...and none of the recommended designers were all that great. The one I use all the time I met on the general interest town mailing list - we are two libertarians in a sea of Massachusetts Democrats. We ended up getting together for poker first, became friends next, and now we farm out tons of design work to him.
Note: no guarantees that this process will work for you.
Look at csszengarden if you have a decent budget. Go to oswd if you're looking for cheap.
I'm very happy with a designer I found via csszengarden, but she isn't cheap. I'll write a blog post about the whole process when it's done. Currently ourdoings.com is using a half-finished design from her, because even half finished it's 10x better than what I had before.
yeah, for whatever reason graphic designers don't tend to congregate there. great for cheap little programming tasks, not so great for original design.
I think it has something to do with the fact that you can turn out shoddy code that produces a functional program, whereas shoddy design is immediately apparent
that's why a lot of design stuff you get when outsourcing is template-based and replicated across multiple sites.
Found mine on xing. One I found by comparing the works of several designers I found on Xing. Another one found me on Xing when he needed a coder, and in turn I asked him to design.
Note: no guarantees that this process will work for you.