99designs is one of the most popular online design contest marketplaces. It relies on the concept of crowd sourcing in bringing together a pool of designers from all over the world and small to medium-sized businesses, which needs design solutions.
If you need something designed, 99designs can help you. Projects categories include logos, web design, banner ads, and even merchandise design for things like t-shirts and clothing.
99designs – How It Works
Contest holders pay a listing fee of $39 plus 10% of the prize offered for each listed project. Depending on the type of project, there is a minimum set prize. For the amount you pay as a contest holder, here is what you will get:
- 100% money back guarantee
- A pool of approximately 80,175 designers
- Wide variety of designs to choose from for each contest
- Option to run a regular or guaranteed contest
- Option to run a blind contest where no one gets to see the submissions other than you
- Unlimited revisions
- Access to tips on every aspect of running a successful contest
Why Use 99designs?
Economical Way to Get Design Projects Accomplished. 99designs is definitely an invaluable site for anyone trying to start up businesses. The site runs on crowd sourcing – designers compete to win your business. The amount you will end up paying for the winning design (listing fee, 10% of the prize and the offered prize) will usually be cheaper compared to the amount you will be paying for hiring a professional designer, plus you get to see way more variety of designs.
Money-Back Guarantee. This feature is available if you opted for holding a regular contest. With any regular contest, if you do not like any of the submitted designs, you have the option not to choose choose one and you get your money back.
Easy To Use. The project creation area for contest holders is very intuitive and quite simple and user-friendly. One nice feature I like is how it gives you an estimate of the expected number of submissions based on the budget you entered.
Huge Pool of Quality Designers. Crowd sourcing is not crowd sourcing without a crowd. If there is one thing particularly impressive with 99designs, it is that you get a lot of designer participation. 99designs has a HUGE pool of actively participating designers, many who are quite good In fact, a guaranteed prize contest can have as much as 1100+ entries. This in itself beats paying one overpriced in-house designer.
99designs Cons
Some inconsistent Quality of Submissions. Since 99designs attracts both amateur and professional designers alike, you may get submissions which aren’t so great. Still, you can easily ignore the bad submissions and focus on the good ones. Here’s a 99designs tip: if you increase your prize, you will definitely get more quality submissions.
My 99designs Experience
To test out 99designs, I decided to host my own contest to come up for an avatar for a blog of mine. Setting up my contest was very easy using their simple wizard that walks you through each step of the process. I decide to set a prize of $195 for my contest and launched it on the site. 10 days and 41 designs later, I found a really good design for my avatar that I was quite happy with.
The big thing I personally like is the have a number of design choices to pick from. I like the ability to compare different designs, show them to other people, and figure out which is the best for me. There’s a plenty of quality designers on the site and with their money back guarantee, you don’t have much to lose by trying 99designs out.
If you need a nice design for your business, 99designs is worth a try. You pay a certain amount of money to hold a contest, and you get your design project done. Finding a good designer is hard, and if you don’t know one already, crowd-sourcing your design is definitely an excellent alternative.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
While I agree that finding a good designer can be difficult, I don’t think that 99designs is a good way to go about it. The problem with crowd-sourcing your design is that you’ve got a bunch of folks that never get paid even though they did the work.
I wrote a blog post on the issue that became fairly popular and attracted a lot of comments from either side of the issue. I’d suggest you give it a read and see what some other companies and designers have said about 99designs. Your own opinion is also appreciated!
http://www.xemion.com/blog/99designscom-a-warning-to-freelancers-67.html
I’ve run a 99designs logo contest on my own. Much to my dismay, I discovered that I knew nothing about design and also did not have the free time to provide feedback to the designers. Needless to say my contest turned out lackluster at best. I did walk away with an okay logo, but I was not fully satisfied. I certainly did not use 99designs’ crowdsourcing to its fullest potential. In the near future I plan on running another logo contest, but this time I’m going to have professionals manage the contest for me, using http://www.ybrdesign.com/99designs_logoservice to get the job done. I’ve see the contests that they’ve run for others so I think I’ll give them a shot.
Crowdsourcing is an amazing tool, but don’t end up like me wasting money on your contest because you don’t know anything about design or don’t have the free time to provide proper feedback to the designers.
I know some designers dont like crowd sourcing sites like 99Designs. But its the way forward. For small companies and people of low budgets its a great way to get a lot of custom designs
Regards
Paul
Freelancelogo
Thank you for the review. I’m new to the blogging world and am in need of a logo. I will try 99Designs. Wish me luck!
Who cares if designers waste their “time” and not get paid. They know this when they accept the job at a place like 99designs. If they don’t want to take this risk, then don’t do it. The reason issue is that the high-end designers and rip-off artists are freaked out that a good design can be had at a reasonable price. People don’t need all that design fluff and branding mumbo-jumbo. Just give us something that looks good and gets things running.