When designers grouse about losing business to 99designs, they should try to keep in mind that they're grousing about losing customers who only have $300 to spend on a logo design, or $500 to spend on a web design.<p>You're really just losing cheap customers. Cheap customers are not fun to work with.
I often recommend 99designs to startups that need logos. For startups, logos are like domain names: they don't have to be great, just good enough. (E.g. Google.) And I have never yet seen 99designs fail to deliver in this respect. Often the startups that use 99designs get better logos than the ones that hire individual designers for the purpose.<p>The designers who complain about 99designs remind me of the record labels. Something you used to charge a lot for, you can no longer charge a lot for. But things aren't going back.
For me there's a bigger issue here than price, and it affects a larger market than just graphic design. I completely support the free market argument, and when 99designs and crowdspring first came out I viewed them as a great opportunity for young/inexperienced designers to work on small low-stakes projects that lacked capital and produce innovative work that would get them noticed. My experience with both sites and their users in the time since has dispelled that notion.<p>Sites like 99designs guarantee a certain number of users will submit entries for your project. While that's a great way to counter the possibility of low quality work, it poses a serious problem for designers (and eventually customers).<p>In most projects there is only one cash reward. That means if 30 people submit designs, only one gets paid. From a pure efficiency standpoint that means 30x the work is being done. Not only is this wildly inefficient, but it eventually leads to lower quality work overall.<p>Compare this structure to something like Amazon Mechanical Turk or SETI@home. In most 'crowdsourced' systems each user contributes value to a project by performing a small part of the overall work. There is often a small duplication of efforts to maintain quality and speed when a small number of users produce aberrant or delayed results. But overall the entire project is cut into small pieces and distributed to individuals. That's not the case here. Multiple submissions act as an insurance policy against poor quality work, but the very nature of the system treats that as the norm.<p>Requiring a dozen or more submissions suggests the management is aware of this issue. Higher quality designers will eventually tire of the much higher workload required to generate returns and migrate to other systems. The longer this system exists the more it will become the home of an unscrupulous breed of designers who simply change text from project to project.<p>Many 'designers' have a collection of 30 'logos' that are basically clip art that they use for every project. Since the return on their investment is so low it's not worth creating something new for each project. That leads to heavily recycled work and what can (and often does) become little more than a non-automated clip art text replacement tool.<p>There must be a better system in which creatives can actually divide work instead of duplicating it, and in so doing create a more valuable final product. The same problem exists on sites like Victors and Spoils for advertising
I use 99designs, mycroburst, and crowdspring because I can't afford a real designer now. I'm not "cheap". I understand the trade-off. Once my startup is making more money, I will invest in a more expensive design but right now, I just cannot afford it. The same goes for programmers. I will be programming as much as I can by myself but outsourcing programming tasks to help get the site done in a reasonable amount of time. Local designers and programmers really do not want to help out a bootstrap startup. I do not see any alternative at this point.
i would argue this isn't a 'free market' problem as professional designers are probably tackling a different market altogether (pricewise and customerwise). Instead, i think the problem is that 99designs hurts the public image of designers in much the same way that rentacoder (and to a lesser extent, topcoder) does.<p>Which is to say that the problem with these spec websites is that they commoditize design (and coding) work in a way which devalues <i>the process</i> behind the trade, which is arguably what you're really paying for.<p>And say what you will about the quality of the end product, the damage is that people walk away with the idea that design or programming or whatever is not <i>getting there</i> it's about <i>the destination</i>. For a reason why this is a bad idea, look at why people wax poetic about <i>'thoughtful design'</i> or any of those sites that focus on <i>the details.</i><p>It's not that these sites are actually bad and for someone who wants an aesthetic facelift, i'm sure these are often 100% useful, but the utility and the domain of applications where something like 99designs is pretty limited, so i guess you get what you pay for.
As a part-time designer I have loved having a place to refer clients that see more value in the number of different ideas that are created, not the consulting/revision process. For those types, this is the perfect solution.
That is not to say that the quality of the work on 99designs is low, I have been quite surprised by the quality of some of the stuff on there.<p>Anything that helps get better design out there is fine by me.
As the article points out, certainly not a problem specific to design.. In fact, I wonder how many of the designers who're complaining have taken advantage of the microstock photography explosion, or turned to flickr for their stock photography.
This post came at a pretty good time for me - I had been considering 99designs for the next redesign of one of my company's micro-sites.<p>What alternatives would HN recommend over 99designs? We've got our own coders, so need nothing more than an actual design/layout.
I can't afford even the 99designs rates, so I created the logo for my startup -- <a href="http://stellient.com" rel="nofollow">http://stellient.com</a> -- myself. I searched through <a href="http://www.istockphoto.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.istockphoto.com</a> and found a nice clipart which I tweaked in Inkscape, combining it with a nice free font from FontSquirrel; and I couldn't design my way out of a wet paper bag.<p>That being said, great logo design needn't really be expensive: <a href="http://misipile.com" rel="nofollow">http://misipile.com</a> has one of the best portfolios I've ever seen, and their rates are not much higher than the 99designs ones.
The problem with complaining about people who make a different amount of money than you is that it's completely relative. While the $100/hr designer bitches about $10/hr designer "devaluing the market", the $500/hr may be complaining about the $100/hr designers doing the same thing. Usually, whatever level you happen to be at will seem to you like it's the ideal level. The same concept applies to taxes. The tendency is for people to think that people who make more than they do should be taxed more, while people making less than them should be taxed less.
I've just been reading the book "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism" by Ha-Joon Chong and one thing that I can bring to the table from that book is the notion of Immigration Control (in chapter 3) as the single most influential factor in holding wages up in countries. The example he gives is of a Swedish bus driver being paid 50x as much as an Indian one, where as they do the same job, just in different places.<p>Now since anyone in the world can create and submit work for 99designs (as well as for any other internet / information based agencies) it really levels out the playing field and removes the barrier of immigration when it comes to wages. Meaning that information workers (designers in this case) from developed countries need to add more value to what they are doing than what is available through sites like 99designs, if they want to continue practicing their craft.
This designer makes the case that 99designs has created an environment where plagiarism has few consequences:<p><a href="http://www.thelogofactory.com/logo_blog/index.php/copied-work-entered-into-99designs-logo-design-contest-again/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thelogofactory.com/logo_blog/index.php/copied-wor...</a><p>(Although I suppose that that risk might not be enough to rank in the top issues a startup has to deal with...)
Depends on your business I guess, far more important than a logo to us is the way we present data in our UI and the app backend, the logo is more of a nice to have so we used one of these services and were happy with the result.<p>So yes we are the kind of cheap client a designer would want to avoid at this stage and these services suit it.
99designs exploits naivety and exploits economic hardship.<p>I can't see how the system is different to a pyramid scheme. The majority of the participants will see no benefit by submitting an 'entry'.<p>Crowdsourcing has the potential to be enormously beneficial to society - but the crowdspring / 99design model is unfair.
The nice thing about this is that it gives people who want to break into 'design' a place to get their first jobs perhaps, without having to cultivate a a flow of contacts. I imagine people who are already experienced designers will have a more steady and stable body of work from their network.
This is missing the point. The problem isn't that some designers are losing work to 99designs. The problem is that spec work devalues the entire design industry.
99Designs is like a game for the people, if you really don't care much about the design of the project or logo or whatever it maybe, its great and can do the job.<p>If your looking for something exact I wouldn't recommend, hire one good designer. Its a great startup idea and works well.