Which Is A Crowd Sourcing Service For Creating Original Graphics?

The appearance of your online store matters. Customers employ a shop's logo and website design to judge its trustworthiness and professionalism.

Just ecommerce storeowners and managers are businesspeople, not necessarily graphic or web designers. And so their expertise is in merchandising, business management, or purchasing, non creating attractive logos or even bonny websites.

Four stars
Online storeowners take had one real choice to achieve an attractive site, and that's to hire a professional person designer. While I believe this is even so the best choice, there is as well a potentially less expensive way to become great looking design work done cheers to crowd-sourced design site, 99 Designs.

This week, I spent some time on the 99 Designs site, kick the virtual tires, if you will, as part of my weekly quest to introduce you to some of the products or services I believe could assistance yous ameliorate your business. Ultimately, I gave 99 Designs four out of a possible five stars in this "The PeC Review."

Video: 99 Designs

What is Crowd Sourcing

Before I can talk most how 99 Designs specifically, I need to explicate the concept behind this sort of outsourcing, namely crowd sourcing.

Crowd sourcing (frequently written crowdsourcing) "is when a company takes a task that was once performed past employees and outsources it in the form of an open call to a large undefined group of people generally using the Internet," explained Jeff Howe, the man who coined the term and first articulated its significant in a 2006 Wired magazine article.

The folks at 99 Designs rely on this concept to join a crowd of designers (both professional and amateur) with businesses that need design work.

How 99 Designs Works

For the sake of case, let's say that you lot demand a new logo for your ecommerce site. You know that what yous have now isn't really working and you desire something more unique and more professional. You could hire a designer, cheque his or her references, carefully consider his or her sample piece of work, and then pay nearly $1,200.00 for a good logo.

Or you could try to reduce your costs to, say, $750.00 by creating a contest for a oversupply-sourced pattern at 99 Designs. To offset a design contest at 99 Designs, y'all'll need to create a design brief that provides the customs of designers basic information about what you're looking for in your new logo or website graphic design, including your color palette, mood, or even specifics about lettering.

Next, you fix a budget. List your contest on 99 Designs costs $39.99 plus ten pct of your contest prize value. The competition prize is what yous volition pay for the design you select at the finish of the competition and there are minimums (right now a logo blueprint requires a minimum prize of $150.00). Know that the larger the prize the improve the designs, so for our logo instance, nosotros might want to offer $650.00 which with our listing fees brings our full budget close to the $750.00 I mentioned earlier.

Throughout the contest you should provide feedback to the designs whose piece of work you like the best, helping them refine the look yous want. And finally, you pick the winner. In substitution for the prize coin, the designer volition provide the both the original artwork and the copyright, or ownership, of that artwork.

Guaranteed Prizes Get Improve Designs

The service offers two kinds of contests. At that place are the "regular" contests and "guaranteed" contests. In the latter, the contest holder—that would exist you—promises to pick 1 of the designs submitted and award a prize. In the "regular" category, you might decide you lot don't similar any of the designs, and just keep your coin.

While having the pick not to pay if you don't like a design may seem like a skillful choice, it could mean that you lot won't become as many or as good designs. Specially, I observed a few contests, and I institute that guaranteeing that a prize volition be awarded generally improved the quality and quantity of the submissions. After all, the majority of the designers in the oversupply are working for free, and at least knowing that someone will go paid is a lot of incentive.

Lots of Participation

The primal to the 99 Blueprint business organization model is having a lot of designers willing to work in the promise of earning a prize. Put some other way, oversupply sourcing doesn't work unless you have a crowd.

In this area, 99 Designs shines. One of the contests I followed every bit research for this article had 488 good quality logo submissions. In fact, I thought more than than a dozen of the designs were exceptional.

Summing Upward

99 Designs is a great pick that volition certainly become you a number of slap-up designs, whether you're looking for a new logo, new website layout, or even a Twitter background. Information technology is important to think that this crowd is full of graphic designers not web designers, so if yous commission a website design competition, y'all become a graphic file that will even so demand to be converted to XHTML and CSS.

Resources

Jeff Howe'southward Crowdsourcing Video
Jeff Howe'southward Wired magazine article "The Rise of Crowdsourcing"