99designsReviews 412

After being on 99designs for a couple of days, and entering contests, my profile got suspended due to not meeting their quality standards. By that time I had already won one contest and gotten a 4 out of five stars on one of my other Logo-submissions, as well as very positive feedback one a coupe of other submissions.

I get that 99designs has standards, as they should, but I really think you should get a warning before they suspend you out of the blue for a month. I was in the middle of communicating with the client from the contest I won, and since my profile was on hold, I didn't get notifications on my email. So then I had to check and log in all the time.

When I contacted support to explain this, and to get an explanation to why I was suspended, I just got a 2-sentence copy paste from the original suspension mail. And when I check their reviews here, I see that all they do is to copy paste the same generic answer to all dissatisfied previous members.

Considering that I've put a lot of effort in the work I uploaded, and that I've behaved professional and civil, it also aggravates me that I now have a red banner across my profile saying I broke the code of conduct. According to 99designs this means that I did one or more of these:

- Didn't respect the 99designs community
- Didn't respect all community members
- Copied someone else's work
- Or that I wasn't honest or competed fairly.

All of these sound horrible, and it was really embarrassing trying to explain to my client that I hadn't done anything bad to someone or copied someone's work.

And dear 99designs. If you're going to reply to this, don't do it with your pre-made answers, then you can just leave it be.

I use 99 Designs for all of my design work. I run a small business and their service enables me to showcase myself as a large corporation with high quality designs on a budget. I've been using them for years and they've designed for me... flyers, banners, brochures, car wraps, t-shirts... just about anything you can imagine, they can do. I've had only one issue over the years which was with not getting many designs after starting a contest... which is a rarity. I contacted 99 Designs, they gave me some recommendations on what to do then restarted the contest for me. After implementing their recommendations, I had no other issues. For the designers, I can see some challenges because a lot of designers like to copy other designers work, make a few changes and pass it off as their own in an effort to win the contest. I will never award a contest to a designer that copies another's design... I pay for originality, not copies. However, their selection of designers are some of the best you will find. To date, I haven't found any place I can go to online or locally that would produce better results for the price and quality of work than 99 Designs. I hope they keep investing in the company to make it even better because they're a lifeline for small businesses like mine.

AND WHAT YOU WOULD DO? I WROTE YOU THOUSAND TIMES AND THE ONLY THING YOU DID WAS TO MAKE THE CONTEST PRIVATE, SO PEOPLE THAT DON'T HAVE ACCOUNTS THERE TO NOT BE ABLE TO SEE YOUR SCAM, TO CHANGE THE NAME OF THE DESIGNER WHO COPIED ME, TO DELETE MY ENTRIES SO EVERYTHING I WROTE LOOK AND SOUND LIKE A LIE AND SUSPEND ME FOR NOTHING. WHY YOU SUSPENDED ME?
ANSWER HERE!
I CONTACTED THE DEPARTMENT THAT INVESTIGATES CYBER CRIMES OF THE GOVERNMENT YOUR OFFICIAL OFFICE SITE IS SITUATED IN, YOU WILL HEAR SOON FROM THEM;)
I HOPE YOUR WEBSITE TO BE CLOSED FOREVER

99designs is simply a place to exploit designer like hell, here is my 3 years experience with 99designs.
I am professional designer with a huge experience, I was one of the top most designer in Elance (Every professional designer know that site), after it merged with Upwork I tried 99designs as Upwork was also a scam, full with fake projects and horrible clients. So I thought to work through 99designs but unfortunately it worse than Upwork, in my 3 years I competed more than 500 contests where I was made only 5 contest, even for a very experience designer like me has the wining ratio of 1:100, it does not matter how qualify you are but you can't compete with 100 other designer, even if you come up with some innovative design and appreciated by the client you will find other will start working on your concept, they will modify your concept and eventually someone else will win the contest, it's a place where designers forget their own capability and start working on something else to win the prize, they will show you $199 prize money but trust me you will never ever will win that no matter how much you try or how talented you are, it's just like you go to purchase a new shirt from a shop and you choose only 1 shirt among 1000 others, it does not mean that other 999 shirts are not good, it just the choice of the client, so in my opinion you will have better chance of winning in forex trading( only 5% success ratio) rather than wining in 99designs, only99 designs and the clients are the winner here, for a designer it's like hell, save your time and energy, don't fall in the trap of this kind of sites where designers always exploited. Being a designer, I know how much effort and time we spend on each and every design but you will see not a single client will respect or bother to give you a feedback to your designs before they declined it even we provide it free, that's pathetic experience.
NOTHING IS FREE, so respect your profession, your dignity and moreover your time and your career.

For about $600.00 I ended up having 20+ offshore designers all generically copying the first two designs that I gave 4 or 5 stars. I had to get really specific (and directly message most of them) to get any of them to develop anything original.

There also seems to be a HUGE issue with fraud. Designs in my contest were constantly being withdrawn (or designers' account suspended mid-contest) because they were ripping off other designs as blatantly as possible and/or simply reposting designs verbatim. I did a little snooping and found that multiple entry level designers in my contest were taking designs from better designers (from within my contest) and posting them to their own profiles as samples, continuing the cycle of fraud into other design contests.

I'm savvy enough to catch this, but I worry for all the mom-and-pop shops out there who wouldn't think to thoroughly review designer profiles and catch the scammers.

There also seems to be no chat support on the site, which (again based on experience) is a clear indicator that they anticipate their customers being annoyed and don't want to deal with it, so it's easier to funnel everyone into generic support FAQs.

Ultimately, after a lot of legwork I was able to weed out the crappy designers and find a couple of good ones, but it was a messy process. This one time I used 99Designs will probably be the only time. I'll stick with real agency designs going forward, even if it costs a bit more.

Even for $700 you only get average amateur designers. The designers end up copying the first design you give an above average score to. All I ended up was a lot of very average designs! Highly recommend using designcrowd instead as was much cheaper and ended up with much better designs.

It's a scam. From a contest holder:
"This is a joke. Lxxxxxx coerced Dxxx Hxxxxxxxxxxx into choosing him as the winner of the contest so he could get the job without any competitors getting in the way. This is a breach of contest rules and unfair to all other designers. We apologize to all the legitimate designers that probably could have won the contest with designs that were much better than this garbage. It's an unfair process and 99designs needs to declare the contest unfair and rigged. 99designs should disqualify Lxxxxxx and refund the money back to Dxxx Hxxxxxxxxxxx. Unfortunately this is not happening and DH will be seeking legal relief to remedy the situation."