Design Contest Site Reviews

I recently needed some logo and webpage design for a project I have in the pipeline.

Having heard of 99designs, and after looking around and being impressed with the caliber of designs, I setup a logo design there.

Within the next few days I not only won a drawing to hold a contest on logomyway from a review by Gyutae Park over at Winning the Web (thanks again!) but also by complete coincidence (?), I was offered to hold a free contest at another new site, designerscontest.com and then ran a paid contest there as well.

Though I did hold the same repeat contest across two services for a certain logo (freeg.as - in development), the other two contest were for a webpage and another, separate logo.

As well as running the contests myself, I recommended my dad use these services to get a logo for his startup company, Transitional Technologies LLC which sells HHO Kits online.

On all three of these sites designers are offered a cash prize to put their best foot forward in designing whatever you specify.

As they upload designs, you can rate and comment on what you do and don't like and in the end get exactly what you're looking for, only having to pay for your favorite design.

The value in all the man hours you end up getting from people competing for the prize by submitting entry after entry of quality design can definitely be well worth what you're willing to pay.

Because more and more of these services are popping up, I want to review which of these three I liked the best.

Logomyway

Overall, I was least impressed by the entries I received at logomyway.

For whatever reason, the contest I held attracted some truly abysmal designs. To their credit, this contest had the most overall entries of all four contests I held and a quick look at other designs shows that others are getting some great designs. - I just really don't know how to figure out why I received the bad submissions I did.

Overall it's a great site. You can get a TON more designs than other places in my experience.

Logomyway is the only site of the 3 that features their top designers and if you like the work you see you can get an idea of what to expect.

The process for setting up and running a contest is simple enough, but as their name suggests, the site is only for logo design. Since the site itself collects just a 10% fee of the prize amount it can be money well spent.

99Designs

99designs, being the most well established of the three didn't gather the most entries, surprisingly. This could've very well been the result of the prize amount I offered or maybe it simply didn't stick out well enough in the vast sea of contests they host, but this was still the contest of the four I ran from which I got my favorite entries.

This is also the site my dad chose to host a contest to get a logo for his startup and he received some absolutely phenomenal entries as well.

Designers Contest

Overall, I liked designerscontest's results well enough to run my own paid contest for a webpage in addition to the free contest I used for logo design. I had such a hard time being able to pick the design!

Several great logo designs were uploaded, but only about 10 people even tried to design a webpage.

In considering that they are a newcomer to the game, the logo designs were excellent and the amount that were uploaded is impressive.

The interface for setting up a contest is intuitive and running a contest, of any kind and with any prize amount, will cost you a flat rate of $29.95, which is a great idea instead of the percentage based contests.

All three services are so very similar and while I have my preferences and opinions, there is no clear cut winner. My favorite was probably designers contest followed by 99designs.

Each has their own advantages and you have to personally consider what what you're looking for and you're willing to pay for it.

So long as you take the effort to promote your contests, choose an appropriate prize amount, be as descriptive as possible in the contest brief, and interact with the designers, any of these services will hopefully help you in getting a worthwhile design.