I'm doing them as a inhouse designer. It make sense to do it this way if you are starting a new blog, thats not generating enough revenue to afford dedicated designer/illustrator.

This might change later, because for us, the growth of the blog is faster then traffic growth on homepage and application itself.

So I would advice to use inhouse designer if you already have one. For me it was also a benefit to learn simple but good enough illustrations , that I can later reuse at some webpages like here: www.nicereply.com/more/delighted-vs-nicereply

I know they are not that awsome, and any illustrator can draw better, but at least they look more branded than any stock photos I've ever used...

We are also using custom illustrations for every blog article here at https://www.nicereply.com/blog/

What kind of research are you doing? or what questions you seek answers for?

So let's say behance is irrelevant, dribble ditto. What sites for portfolio/ feeback are still relevant, and worth focusing to ???

I was getting that error too. Try again if few hours ...

What ? There is a page two on DN ??? :-O

This application crashes like crazy, 3 time per hour :( Nevertheless it looks very good and promising, but I dont think it is worth the money , now....