99designs

I spend a few thousand dollars to have several pages developed only to get files my developer can barely use. It's costing me twice as much in development because the files are garbage and 99design did absolutely nothing to help.

You would probably get many designs, but with little to no creativity. In our case we got over 200 different options, but all fairly standard. This is not the right place to look for something out of ordinary.

Although I only purchased the bronze package, I expected to work with better designers. Every design was so simple, I could have just done them myself. Even with extensive feedback, the most the designers did was add extra lines here or there or change the color and font. I though it would get better in the final round but it was more of the same. Extremely disappointed. It was not worth the $300 investment.

There are very few interesting projects to illustrate.
Logos are everywhere.
You give up and start making logos too. Clients can change the brief or choose something completely different from what they originally asked for. That's their right, but it's frustrating if you spent more than 5 hours on a logo for free.
If you think your design looks great, but the client gave it a bad rating, you won't be able to add it to your portfolio, as if this is not the subjective opinion of a person who does not design at all, and your work is of poor quality.
If you want to make money, you need to track orders and do something every day. Do you have time for free work? There is no guarantee that you will make money on your next order, but you might get lucky.
Yes, for poor countries one gain = monthly salary. But you don't win every competition, and you don't win all the time. Don't think that 99 designs will save you from poverty.

If you don't have a portfolio, use 99 designs. You can parse 15 designs in 28 days. Create them all and... Look for a permanent job because you now have a portfolio.

The practice is the only plus of this site. You will receive real tasks to complete them. Perhaps you will receive a nice bonus - money. But you definitely need a regular job where you can talk to a client, make edits and get guaranteed money.

A client can ignore your ideas, not go to the site, postpone the choice of the winner for a week, not answer you, close the contest ahead of time, even if you managed to discuss something and you made edits for it. He just decides to stop submits artwork and choose someone else, even though he loved your design so much. The guaranty won't help. Clients can unlock their contest at any stage, even when it's day 60. And you won't get anything as a finalist.

99 designers are a toy. If you always have extra time or designs to spare, then this is worth a try.
If you want a portfolio, you should give it a try.

But don't take anything seriously. You don't have normal customer feedback, you can't discuss anything, you can't offer sketches and discuss an idea. You just do the design with your eyes closed and it all depends on luck.

I've seen really cool guys get 1 star and ignored, so don't think professionalism will help you win enough contests.

99 designs is a demo version of a designer's simulator.

While I liked working with the particular designer who did my logo, the process at 99designs didn't meet my expectations at all. The contest idea felt a little misleading, as you're guaranteed "30 designs," for example, but really, most of those are just a designer submitting the same design with different font options or icon-based designs, which I could have done myself. I was far from impressed with most of the designers and especially with the number of options for the contest. I debated about hiring a designer directly (which would have cost a third to half the price) and probably would have netted me the same result. It felt expensive and underwhelming.

I really was enjoying the whole process, until all the hard work was done and I had a poll set up and emailed to all my people, that one of the logos was taken down because it was a stock photo. So basically out of 6 designs on poll one was off thats 15% of my creativity and all the days work put in to it was waste. I am glad it was detected but it seriously affected my logo selection process. Also I was not offered any compensation apart from thats I can select a new design. How in the world thats an option when I have submitted the poll by email, thats extremely embarrassing. As a small scale start up business I felt this was great option, but I felt let down. The designer who won and all the designers who submitted were great but one bad apple spoilt the taste and the nature of this experience.

I pulled my contest after the CSR's response to my questions started to give me heartburn. I noticed the use of "already" at least four times in one comment (e.g.'" if the contest is completed already, and you have issues already, Jimdo would handle that already."). This bothered me... my questions at this stage were not confidently answered and CSR had to check for answers to basic questions (e.g. Do you provide support for back-end issues on the website). I think I'll just go with a basic site and look for a private designer.

I was pressured to sign up for this in college. I was going to recommend this to a few of my friends because I thought the concept is great for designers who want to make money. However having it for a few weeks, it's nothing but an additional necessary headache that I don't want anyone to endure, not even people I despise.

A lot of requests there have very fast turnover rates, in that case, it would be difficult to come up with something breathtaking in two days. With that being said, you could follow what the customer or client wants and they would still tell you they don't like it. I didn't like the rating concept nor do I appreciate seeing other people creating designs similar to mine after viewing mine.

If you want to make money, seriously network and find real clients who aren't jerks like this. This website is so difficult to work with especially if you don't see your client on the other end. Constructive criticism isn't even the word used to describe how a design can get a poor rating because the client fails to see what THEY want themselves.

The contests idea is pretty cool until you realize you submit work to them numerous times and haven't made a single buck in weeks. It's a waste of time. Seriously, don't bother with this. If you're a designer and think you're getting quick money by using website like 99Designs or similar places that offer you freelance work, think again. Research first.

I've used 99designs since 2008 and lately I've seen the prices went down along the quality of design submissions, but at the same time the Contest Holders request more features such us mobile design or logo design when the contest is only for a web design with $250 prize. I think this is crazy.

I hope that someone at 99designs read this and take action.

When you select a winning design/designer they will get lazy and make minimal effort to perfect design because they already won and got paid anyway. There's no support to this website shen you try to get things fixed. Just be aware that they use Pakistan designers who are extremely cheap and over price this service.

I made the unfortunate mistake of guaranteeing my design and despite telling 99designs how much I was displeased, they never offered me more than "more promotion" of the contest. I wasted $500 and am not even going to use the logo. The customer service was ok; but the designs were totally awful. Very very disappointed and I would not recommend them to anyone I know. I'm in business over 10 years and in the photography industry.

I'm a designer working full time in a graphic studio and doing occasional freelancing. I've been winning identity and packaging contest on this site since the month I signed up and those are my thoughts about it: A designer can make some money out of this site provided that she doesn't do much research beforehand and goes with first, obvious, mainstream ideas. Cliché is given applause. Too many dots to connect is not welcome.

I've won with designs that made my boss, an art director with a fine art degree and 25 years in the advertising go 'meh', and got eliminated after submitting great, creative designs made after hours of research and brainstorming. To have good work rejected and get paid for mediocre work is well, kind of disappointing.

Company owners who use this site instead of finding a designer in their area don't care for design much, really. They just want a pretty picture. There are exceptions among the contest holders, though. Companies just starting out and on a tight budget, who will very likely replace the place-holder identity from 99designs within a year, if they will survive that long. Then there are ones who don't know any better, but have time on their hands to guide designers (well, pixel pushers in that case) to a decent solution.

Design quality seems to be slightly better in the platinum category, but there are platinum users who do design below site's average and basic users who do better than platinum but just didn't sign up to platinum verification.

Another issue is the business model 99designs has that is hurting designers both on and off the site: every designer on 99designs works on speculation of getting paid, which basically means free work, unprotected with any agreement until (maybe) awarded, which means contest holders can save the propositions and cancel the contest, share the insights a designer has made in an attempt to sell her design in public comments and to promote/rate high on copycats. Faint chance of winning a contest a designer is really interested in, means having the urge to join mare contests, spending less time on each one. The result being lower quality work and giving the designer profession a bad name.

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.

Though 99Designs is a Great Idea of having Design Contests where Clients gets a variety of Designs to choose from. But if at any point you need to contact customer support. Don't Contact, there's no one.

Like you get suspended for low quality designs or for some other issue, they'll suspend you asking a Portfolio of 4-5 designs for 99Designs live contests. Don't design the portfolio, NO ONE IS THERE TO CHECK IT!

You will Never get a Reply from 99Designs or You may get an AUTOMATED reply declaring that you will remain suspended.

They Don't have dedicated Customer Support members! I haven't seen anything worst than 99designs customer support!

At first I was impressed with the concept. I work in the marketing world but didn't have the time or resources to work on this myself and we needed a professional logo for our real estate group. This seemed to be a great solution. We received a variety of designs-I'm sure some of the designers were original and the interaction with designers was good. Unfortunately a design popped up at the end of the second phase-we ran a poll and this new design rose to the top so we ran with it. I had to spoon feed most of the creative but ended up with the basics to work with.
I was disappointed to find the logo that won was not original at all-it was pulled and copied directly out of Adobe Cloud Library. I wish one of the designers that worked so hard to create something original for us had won. I guess we got what we paid for. So sorry for and to all the designers out there who produce quality work.

The quality here is really mixed. If you need something designed that is cheap and generic, 99 designs is for you. If you need something really good, I'd go elsewhere.

I am not sure why but most of the reviews i found for 99designs says "Can't Login". Feeling curious, why?

I gave the extra star because--after following my explicit directions--one of the designers gave me a logomark that I liked. Frankly, though, I'm pretty sure it was luck that I liked it.

FOR $500 I GOT NO RESPONSE FROM THE DESIGNERS LISTED IN THE "DESIGNERS" PAGE. If you scroll through the designers, you see beautiful, elegant and sophisticated logo designs. You won't get anything like this for the $500 I paid. I invited maybe a couple dozen designers to participate in my contest, but only one of them replied to the invitation (and she declined).

F0R $500 YOU WON'T GET THE BEAUTIFUL LOGOS YOU SEE ON THE WEBSITE. You will get, literally, clipart and freeware fonts. Drawn up by teenagers. Seriously. All of my submissions were by people who had never won a contest. Who clearly had no experience or eye for design.

The designers were essentially unable to follow my directions. Primarily because they weren't going to spend time with me because their time isn't worth just a chance on $300. Also, English was a problem.

Eventually, I got a logomark and an open-source font that I liked. I approved the contest and paid the $500. But the final drawings weren't what I asked for, so I had to BUY ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR so that I could do the alignments and colors the way I'd requested (the colors were useless for printing). I'm no designer, but even I knew that the final drawings were useless.

The overall experience was terrible. The online chat personnel were responsive, but they aren't giving me designs. All of the designs were horrific with a couple of notable exceptions--and with those, I'm certain that I got lucky.