You have many good choices online of crowdsourcing graphic design contest sites. Which one is the best for your logo and design projects?
Today I will review and compare the two top sites, 99designs and Design Crowd.
My long career in business marketing has taught me a lot about how to source and buy good graphic design without going crazy or broke! Graphic design is such a personal and subjective art.
Artists are very different than us business people. Sometimes it seems we speak two different languages. With this in mind, I will use these criteria to rate the various services for the ease of use and ultimate delivery for business owners – not for professional advertising agency types. They already know how to buy a great graphic design. This review is for regular business folk like you and me.
Read about my experience buying a new logo for my website (above) review of 99designs logo services
Based on comparing 99designs to many of its competitors (see reviews below) I recommend Design Crowd as the runner-up to the winner for logos 99design.
99designs Comparison and Reviews
99 Designs and Design Crowd Similarities
The two sites, 99designs.com and Design Crowd, are comparable in terms of size, pricing and number of graphic designers competing in logo design contests.
Design Crowd claims to be the world’s #1 custom design marketplace. 99Designs is actually larger based on the number of designers at close to a million, 938,643 with DesignCrowd total graphic designers of 429,917 as of January 2017.
Both sites produce quality designs – see the comparison below of logos designed at each site. You can see that they are both of high-quality.
99designs sample logos – Legal firms and attorney
Design Crowd and 99 Designs Differences
The main differences are in pricing, features included in packages, money-back guarantee and number of design submissions received in logo contests.
- Pricing Compared – Design Crowd claims to be the lowest, however it may not necessarily be so for your project. I found their pricing confusing (see screenshot below). They charge your a “posting fee” and then you are charged extra for “project upgrades” and transaction fees of 4%. Yikes. Why can’t I just buy a full package like 99designs offers – Bronze $299 (I bought this one), Silver, Gold, and Platinum. Also, it took a while to find the pricing on Design Crowd site. It was not very transparent whereas 99designs has a pricing tab on the top menu of all pages with a clear chart shown below.
- Packages and Features Compared – 99designs packages are all-inclusive as opposed to Design Crowd that lure you in with a low price then add many extra fees including a transaction fee.
- Money Back Guarantee – 99designs money back guarantee is more generous and clearly stated as below.
- The number of Design Contest Submissions – This is where 99designs blows away Design Crowd. I got 100+ logo designs in my contest, read about it here, while Design Crowd says you will get 25-100+ designs per project, you can see by browsing the site that get much less, some as low as 14 looks!
I would be very unhappy if I went to the trouble to launch a logo design contest and only got a few designs. It would be a waste of my time and energy.
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