99designs

Why 99designs sucks

Everyone knows my feelings about crowd-sourcing services like 99designs (founder Mark Harbottle). They promote a system that ruins the client impression with an idea that it is simply a matter of spending an hour tossing pixels at a digital canvas without any thought.

Small chance of winning

On average, chance of winning is 5.34%.

Unrealistic demands

Contest holders develop a super-human mentality that other designer feed. This leads contest holders demanding unrealistic time and devotion to a project without compensation to back it up.

As an independent designer, you have the ability to set rules and exceptions on you and clients. In a contest setting these don’t exist, if you piss them off, kiss “winning” goodbye.

Working for nothing

99designs is similar to asking a stadium full of people to work and only paying one. If you spend the time developing unique concepts and exceptional work would be better off flipping burgers.

Nearly no client interaction

I love sitting down with clients daily; face-to-face interaction adds to my commitment and affects finished work. 99designs kills this interaction by believing it’s as simple as ranking designs on a 1-5 scale instead of clients expressing themselves.

Design is easy and cheap

99designs believes with $200 and a brief design summary everything is possible. But this mindset only devalues public perception of the industry. Good design is understanding your client’s needs then designing and developing unique concepts.

Local supporting local

As a small design studio owner, I rely on other local businesses to keep my doors open. The buying local first mindset has landed me great gigs and continues supplying word-of-mouth referrals. Always try a local source!

99designs breeds the shotgun effect; enter as many contest as possible, as quickly as possible, in hopes of winning one, if possible. Sadly, this isn’t helpful to designers that waste hours or small businesses ending up with stolen or poor results.

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