If a contest holder withdraws a contest and plans to rip off the designers who submitted entries, it will not come as a surprise to him/her. He or she knows this before they withdraw the contest, and most certainly has already saved the files to a computer so they can use the file to cut and modify to their needs.

This is not an arbitrary conclusion. The CH that stole from me did so before officially ending the contest. He had a live site online using my graphics while still in the process of “making a decision”. Had he been smart as well as sleazy, he could have simply withdrawn the contest and my proof would have gone up in smoke.

As to letting you know I’m being ripped off – I did. And you continued to allow this person to do business on your site. Even stood up for him publicly when I let other designers (the ones you pretend to be protecting) know that the guy is a thief.

Further, it hides important factual information from designers. When a contest holder withdraws an entry, designers would like to go back to the previous contest(s) and find out why. Was it legitimate? Were there no good entries? Or did the CH have plenty of good entries, and simply cut and run? We cannot tell – because you hide this information FROM THE DESIGNERS.

Again, I can speak from personal experience. A contest run by Elite Commission had a dozen or so quality entries. The CH wasn’t happen (enough), despite giving 4 stars to several entries, and extended the contest, inviting a large number of additional designers. The contest bore him at least two dozen quality entries – and then he split, withdrawing the contest – with protection from you to his public reputation. A little research and I came to find the company’s name popped up on forums for affiliate marketing. The company had a reputation for not paying their affiliates money that was owed.

These are the people you protect.

I’m sorry. No. In no way does your practice protect the designer. It only protects the unscrupulous contest holder.

http://99designs.com/people/jasonaiken

Best of luck.

Jason

I know you participate in projects from time to time so if you ever find situation where someone runs a project… gets a refund then steals the design – please report it to me.

I assure you – we do not have private projects or lock contests to protect rip off artists.

It’s actually quite the contrary…

We lock contests to protect the designers – if a client is not resolving their contest we lock it which hides the designs so the contest holder can’t access them.

Regarding private projects…
Some people want their projects private. One of the most common reasons is search engine rankings. 99designs ranks high in search engines… if someone has a new business they don’t want the first thing to come on google to be their 99designs project – nothing sinister.

To your point about good designers participating on the site – We have a record number of projects open on the site so I agree we could always use more.

Best,
Jason

http://99designs.com/designers

Insecurity about your design is natural. I do that. Every time I look at my own website it’s never good enough. Or when it finally is, I find another designer’s site that blows it away, and suddenly it’s ugly and humiliating to be on display. Again.

Most of your potential customers will think the work you do is amazing. Surf the net a while. When you find a bad looking site, look at the “designed by” link at the bottom. Someone will be proudly displaying their portfolio of ugly work. And people are hiring them.

Use that as your launching pad. Recognize that you can make money – and possibly a good living – doing this work. Branch out. I also do web and database programming, as well as build desktop applications, and and now starting to work on my first cross-platform (iPhone, Blackberry, Android) mobile app – and already have hires on three jobs in that field in the near future. Last year, I designed one website, and one flyer. That’s all the graphic work I did. The rest was programming. By choice. Now I’m about to get back into making some – as you call it – art, getting my feet web by goofing off at none other than 99designs!

I am not against crowdsourcing, per se. I think that I’ve come across as that way, and it’s not true. I am against a lot of the crap that goes along with it. I think Specwatch needs to refocus if they want to do any good. They won’t stop crowdsourcing by telling designers about it. If anything, their current methods will help to push the pricing downward, by scaring off the quality designers leaving a void to be filled by the bad ones – ones that will gladly work for less money and can now win because the good designers are sitting home wondering what to do, while the bad ones are sponging up the money in the pool not caring.

I would like to see Specwatch start going after the faux design firms that sell themselves as web design outfits, but then run private contests on 99D and outsource the work. They are pretty easy to pick out. The contests are low-end on the pricing, and they have to “show these to the client” before offering feedback. These scammers are a bigger issue to the American designers concerned about their money flowing offshore, because the end buyer is not aware of the design contest. They believe they walked into an American web design company office, dropped down thousands of dollars to have someone in Pakistan design their site for $250.

If Specwatch started informing the site buyers that the company they hired did this, the referrals for these design mills would dry up overnight. My own issue with 99D started over just such a case (if you haven’t read all the above comments). A sleazy operator in Southern California that sold his design “services” to a Los Angeles company, then ran a contest at 99D, then without picking a winner, took my design and converted it into a website for his client – which I caught.

99D has since taken measures to insure the protection of ripoff artists by closing private contests after the contest ends, and locking down withdrawn contests – so there is no proof the designers are being robbed.

I’m rambling so I am going to stop, here. My mind is mush after information overload from a conference for mobile app designers this morning. Hope *something* I wrote makes sense – and is helpful.

As for the crowdsourcing sites, those are just worthless all together from what I can tell.

Yes I’ll look into being more active in the community so that maybe I can find a trustworthy partner that knows about marketing. My web design firm might be put to a halt soon because of the huge interest I’ve had in this new niche idea I’m working on, so hopefully that takes off and I won’t have to pain myself with these cheap retards who undervalue designers (with 3d artists and animators to be the exception).

Yep, cgi guys, animators and such seem to be the only respected designers from what I have noticed… hmm.. maybe I’ll get into that industry… lol.

Most of the problem lies in the customer, not the provider. People that utilize these services are cheap, and generally have no business picking their own designs. They do more harm to their own business than good by not paying a trained professional to do the job. And even frequently those that do, will dispute elements of design by the professional – because anyone that’s sat down with a copy of Photoshop (probably stolen) and made a flyer for their garage sale thinks they know how to design.

And then after they hire someone in India to do the work at bargain basement prices, they complain about politicians sending all the jobs overseas.

This is getting off topic, and more of a forum discussion than for this thread, but I have the same problem with self-promotion you do. I solved that by partnering with people that don’t have that problem. Some are designers. Some are programmers. Some just slick talkers. All are good at marketing, and socializing, and convincing people to pay more than I would dare ask for – and all need my skillset to get the checks in hand. My own website has been offline for…I don’t even know how many months. It’s not important. I do almost all of my work as a subcontractor now – working for people that actually understand and appreciate my abilities. Saves a lot of headaches, and fills a hole where I am weak in my business. You might try that route.

This is true that 99designs is ripping off the industry… at least from what I’ve seen in my short time in that market.

I’m on Brandstack and my cheapest logo on there with domain is 1995.00 so we’ll see how long it takes to sell, does really matter though right because it’s just sitting there and when it sells, that’s passive income.

I was talking about sites like graphic river or any other marketplace run by envato, sure they give you 50-70% of every sell depending on how much you sell but they sell your products for next to nothing. You can buy a pretty good quality wordpress template on there for a mere 20 bucks… is that justice? Grant it if you sell 1000s, which a lot of sellers on there do, then that’s a lot of dough.

As far as legitimately making money buy bringing in clients the traditional way, I’ve been struggling with that mainly because of my marketing skills.

I appreciate the work you have been doing in this area but there are other sites of concern too such as Crowdspring and even sites like Freelancer.com which have turn these bidding war job boards into a fight for the Middle East to take over everyone by offering there stuff for next to nothing and then not even completing the work. Everything has turned into that… Elance, Freelancer.com, Guru and countless others. You can go to donanza and find everything offered at all these crappy place from one big crappy place. inkd is that worse, they give you 20% from every sale! OMG, you put the work into it and they have the gall to give you a mere 20%! Ooooh the nerve and that sad thing is that people do it.

Are there any good companies like these? Well I like what they’re doing with Upstack so far and it seems that Wes Wilson (Founder of Brandstack/Upstack) hasn’t yet fallen into the profit trap and turned his business into crap… but usually it’s only a matter of time. Poptent seems to be ok, tender 3d and I’m still on the fence about the envato owned sites.

It’s good that you are taking the time to educate yourself about the market. I know I sound very down on the whole thing, but I’m not totally opposed to crowdsourcing and contests. My issues have to do with the people in charge and the unscrupulous way things are run.

There are opportunities for picking up some extra dollars in your spare time with these avenues, but just be careful where you get yourself into the game. 99designs plays itself up as a protector of designers, and about making things equal for all, yadda yadda, but really they are the greediest company and do the least for the designers of any similar site in the industry.

You can completely ignore all of the angry back-and-forth banter about the issue above, with all of the opinions rhetoric, and take a simple objective look that puts things in perspective.

99designs has a logo store, where you can put up logos to sit and be sold for $100, or $300 for exclusive rights. Brandstack.com does the same thing, but the minimum price is $250, and you set your own maximum. Sounds like Brandstack is better – higher prices means more money, right?

That’s not really a strong factor in deciding which company is good or bad. But then look at the commissions.

Brandstack takes a 15% cut of the sale price off of every logo you sell. Sound heavy? 99designs pockets a whopping 70% off of your creative work on every sale. I think that’s a tad higher than the going agency rate out there.

99designs is truly the sleazy sweat shop operator of the design industry.

So far I have spent about 12 hours on these sites before reading this post, so not bad.

I’m going to give spec work an extra thought before every going into it again. I have heard some people talking about these sites and making good money but for the most part, the news is all bad.

I also post products on various marketplaces such as graphic river. What do you think about this? Might this hurt a business?

Again, thanks for the hard work you’re doing for the design community.