99designs, Logo Contest, Designcrowd, Design Hill, and other platforms provide a solution for a problem every new business faces: Creating a logo that represents the vision, values, and esthetic of the new venture well. Working with designers is challenging as expressing what you (the client) like often is abstract and challenging to put in words. Also, most designers stick rather closely to their own design language, making it difficult to hire one designer to develop different types of logos to iterate further on. The most obvious solution is to work with multiple designers for inspiration and then go in-depth with one. This is precisely the problem that design competitions try to solve by offering prize money to a single winner and thereby motivating many designers to submit logo suggestions.

Design Competitions

Design competitions follow a similar process with defined steps where designers and purchasers must complete precise steps. The following steps lean primarily on the 99designs process.

1. Describe the Logo
   Deliver a design brief, a color schema, and choose logos of other companies to let designers know your style.
2. Select Package
   Packages with increasing price points do not offer additional deliverables or services but provide a higher reward for the winner and, therefore, attract more and better talent.
3. Designers Submit Entries
   Designers work on logos and submit themat any time in the contest duration. Entries can be commented on and rated. This allows designs to be refined and other designers to derive the target design language of the client.
4. Finalist Selection
   After the contest duration has passed one to six finalists must be selected for another round. After that, all other designs are discarded and no longer can be accessed.
5. Finalist Round: Logo Refinement
   Finalists can submit refined logos based on feedback given.
6. Winner Selection
   A single winner is selected, and all others are eliminated.
7. Design of other Deliverables
   Based on the competition, additional deliverables are now created by the winner. These may be business cards, letterheads, Facebook / LinkedIn cover pictures, etc. Once all deliverables are completed, both parties sign a “Design Transfer Agreement” to transfer the copyright, and files are handed over.

Design Community Critique

The design community has a fairly stark opinion on design competitions: They hate them. Why are they seen as something to avoid at all costs? Primarily it is about exploiting many designers who do not receive any money since the prize money only goes to the winner. It is about being a self-respecting designer who should not do work for free. It is also seen as a platform where customers do not value the form of art and energy designers put into the logos. Most submissions will go completely unanswered as there are so many other options. The commoditization of receiving many designs for near-free is seen as diluting the value of professional design in general.

“Most experienced designers won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole” (source), and thus from a customer standpoint, you likely will not receive top, top designers.

The Reddit user thisdesignup put gave a short and sweet metaphor that paints a good picture of why design contests would not work in most other situations:

A good comparison with design contests is imagining going to multiple restraunts for dinner, eating a meal at each one, then deciding to only like one meal and paying that restraunt. You wouldn’t get away with only paying one restaurant in real life.

But design contests do this and get away with it. A contest could easily have 500 to 1000 hours put into it by many designers and the person hosting the contest will only have to pay for 5 to 10, may 20, hours of work, if that. (Reddit)

Personal Experience: 99designs Competition

The design competition we conducted was for a company called DataLbry which you will see in all of the Logos. We booked the Brand Identity Pack from 99designs which contains a logo, business card, letterhead, envelope, and Facebook / LinkedIn cover. The chosen silver package where 99designs set the expectation to ~40 designs costs 801 EUR (in January 2022; USD 886).

Additionally, due to a coupon code from a podcast, we received the Power Pack for free. This features (promises 40% more designs), highlights (promises 15% more designers), and posts the competition in the 99designs blog (promises 15% more designs).

The design brief can be accessed here and is very simple. It states what the company does abstractly and containes logos that we like. After creating the brief and prepaying the design contest started with a 7-day contest runtime.

The number of submissions we received blew us away from the first day. We received exactly 50 submissions by 26 designers and were highly impressed by the quality and the variety of designs. Already after one day, we had logos that we could imagine using as our new company logo. We provided ratings for each entry and wrote a short message to every designer where we did not see any potential. Ratings allow us to easily rate each entry on a scale of 1–5. Writing submissions comments allowed us to provide feedback or iteration ideas. These comments were mostly answered promptly with new design suggestions.

Rating entries, quite possibly, accelerated the speed at which new designs were submitted. For one, with a public contest, anyone may view all logos and ratings; thus, quickly providing ratings gives other designers the chance to understand what we want. Blind contests, an option in 99designs that makes other designers not see the submissions of their competitors, is a popular ask by designers as it stops copy-cats from just iterating on a 5-star rated design and then taking away the grand prize. However, we kept the competition public designers could learn from the competition and expected the final result to be better. However, Copy-Cat logo designs did become an increasing trend as any five-star design was then submitted in a slight variation many times over by different designers. Personally, we would have chosen the original designer and then told them in the iteration round that they should take specific elements from other submissions as supporting people making their life easy by not creating original work would not feel good.

The Guaranteed Prize option of 99designs shows designers that you are committed and will definitely choose a winner who is paid the reward. This convinces more designers to create a design because they know that you will not pull out at the last minute and make use of the money-back guarantee (and possibly still illegally use a logo). Luckily, this option can be selected not only at the beginning but at any point in the competition. We activated this on day three when already 226 designs had been submitted and we knew with 100% certainty that we had fantastic logos to choose from.

The sheer number of entries blew us away. Expecting 50–100 designs at the end of the seven-day contest and receiving 417 entries by 110 different designers was more than just a surprise. Quite honestly, this was almost overwhelming as we suffered from overchoice (see the Paradox of Choice).

99designs offers a polling feature where the creator selects multiple logos which friends and network can then vote and comment on. This feature works well and is helpful, especially for open-source projects or in a culture of employee participation. We asked employees and friends what they thought of the logos and received a very wide range of feedback.

In the finalist selection, we selected four finalist designers. These are not designs that are iterated on but rather designers who you can communicate with to ideally prepare final logos with each that then can be compared. As we wanted a basis logo for the company with different variations of it for the different products we also asked for permutations of the logo as a very rough draft. According to the competition rules we were not allowed to ask for other logos so it was fine that not all finalists had good options but still, it let us know how flexible the logos are.

Finally, after selecting a winning design only the additional deliverables (e.g. Facebook cover, business card, etc) had to be created. We selected an “entry level” designer as we liked the logo design and like to support underdogs. This entry level status, however, became very noticeable when trying to work more closely with them: They were extremely unresponsive (3–5 days no answer even though we had to accept after seven days) and the first drafts of the designs were more than underwhelming. You never know what is going on in the life of others, but this was very disappointing! Nonetheless, a couple of days after the actual deadline and after a couple of iterations we received files that we liked and accepted. Especially for a continuous working relationship communication is essential. Therefore, I recommend you not make the same mistake and ensure communication is solid before choosing a winner.

Conclusion

The experience of using a design competition for the first time was beyond impressive. Especially with graphic design, more choices make it easier to find a fitting design and there is no better (or at least more cost-effective way) to get the quantity of input. The platform 99designs guided the process well, reducing efforts on our (the client’s) side. At the same time reviewing many hundred logos took much more time than working with only a single or few designers. Due to the nature of working with many designers superficially, instead of a single one in-depth, there is little consultation available, e.g. which color palette fits well together, which may have negatively impacted the final quality of the design.

Concerning the critique from the design community, I believe that every designer is free to choose what they do, how they do it and how much they charge. I cannot imagine professional designers with enough commissions participating in logo design competitions, but it is a great way to gain experience in designing logos and communicating with clients. I think back to when I developed an Android Application for a subway-like store to allow for online orders that effectively paid under USD 0,50 per hour. However, I possibly never would be where I am now without having done that.

Personally, I would use 99designs or one of its competitors again if I have a need for it. Thanks to them being transparent on all past and ongoing competitions you can look on the contests page to see many past and ongoing competitions to get an idea of the quality and process on your own.

TL;DR: My Top Three Competition Recommendations:

• Use a public contest (not blind contest) and review entries swiftly.
• Guarantee a prize as soon as a single logo satisfies your needs.
• Communicate with finalists to ensure you match well.