DesignContest Review
DesignContest is a design crowdsourcing site, which currently has a designer base of more than 260K designers. This is more than most of the crowdsourcing sites. DesignContest cut its teeth on design contests that carried a money-back guarantee from top design professionals. This DesignContest review covers the important aspects and features offered by the crowdsourcing platform, that a small business needs to keep in mind, while setting out to get a custom graphic design, especially business logo design, etc.
In September 2020, the company came out with a 2.0 upgrade that has added many benefits and improvements. First, any user can either start a design contest or hire any of the DesignContest designers one-on-one. Plus, it has extended its services to 35 different logo and design areas.
The user experience is not only much faster, but it is incredibly intuitive. It has also gone beyond its industry-leading money-back guarantee, but now also guarantees design delivery, and it handles NDAs and transfer rights too!
Along with English, the site is also available in Spanish, French, Russian, German, and other languages, making it a global choice for businesses seeking graphic designs.
History of DesignContest
DesignContest dates back to 2003, which makes it one of the oldest in the industry. Founded by two incredibly talented and successful Russian entrepreneurs, who understood consumers, DesignContest to date has more than 3.4 million designs with a client satisfaction rating of over 95%. The company serves as a testament to the quality, caring for the customer, as well as retaining top professional talent that delivers on time and with great results.
Design Contest Process
DesignContest operates very similarly to the other major design contest websites in the industry. However, the initial design process is extremely fast and user-friendly. Any entrepreneur or small business can easily choose between starting a design contest or searching for and hiring a select professional.
In our DesignContest review we obseved that unlike other sites, the user on DesignContest can go through designer portfolios, another upgrade that places the best work in front of the client’s eyes. Hiring a designer also comes with faster and more direct communication with that designer.
What do you need? Right off the bat, users get to choose what type of design product they want, and there are 35 categories from which to choose. This then rolls them quickly into the brand name, then industry type, and specifics on need. Again, we see this as far more intuitive as their prior version.
Design Brief: As we discussed above, this is one of the simplest steps on DesignContest. Now you get not only brief parameters on five distinct scales (modern to classic, minimal to complex, loud to subtle, playful to serious, and luxury to budget), but they also include specifics on what the client ‘likes’ or ‘doesn’t like’ – with text to expound. There is also an option to add image files to show designers off-the-bat examples of taste and need.
Then you get to select a package and you get to fix our prize money for the same. You also get to add extra options like contest add-ons and you could add prize money for 2nd or 3rd design winners as well. The option for more awards to non-winners often produces more designers per contest.
Contest Run & Feedback: Usually contests last for about seven days, and once started, you should start receiving submissions after just a few hours. The number of design entry submissions is determined directly by contest pricing and design brief. We also noticed a great feature during our DesignContest review which was that the platform provides you an estimate of how many designs you can anticipate to receive for your contest.
In this time, you can provide feedback to the designers as your contest progresses. You can eliminate designs, vote for the ones you like, suggest changes and corrections to the designers.
Select a winner: At any given point before the contest comes to an end, you have the option to choose a final winner from the design submissions. From the moment you finalize a winner, you have seven days to request changes and finalize the design. You also have the option to buy any other design from the contest for a price of $99, which also starts a one-to-one job with the designer.
Final Design Handover: Once you finalize the design (or the seven day period is over), the designer sends you the final source files of the design. All file formats including high-resolution JPG, PNG, AI, Vector, SVG, etc are provided to you. Once you both confirm the completion, the copyright of the files transfers to the client, and the designer is paid the prize money of the contest.
Advantages
- High rating contest entries (4.8/5 ratings from most customers).
- Ability to hire 1-on-1 from the beginning.
- Multi-language platform support (Spanish, French, German & Russian Support).
- The large designer base of 260K freelancers.
- New 2.0 upgrade increases speed and betters user experience.
- Real-time interaction with the designers during the contest
- Protection of contests by NDAs and not listing on search engines.
- Over 50K+ Happy Customers with a 95% client rating.
- Free design consultation for all customers. Handy for customers new to the design process.
- Inbuilt contest poll function helps to get feedback from friends and family, which helps in judging the design submissions.
- Money-back and design deliver guarantees.
Disadvantages
- The option to set variable prize money can increase the price of a contest variably.
- The money-back guarantee is only applicable if the user has commented or rated on at least 80% of the designs submitted.
Takeaway
Our DesignContest review saw many positive changes from their 2.0 update in September 2020. It has strengthened itself as a serious player, having made a strong investment into winning individual and small company client business from other players.
If you are clear about what your requirement is, or you want to give designers complete freedom, the clear and simple brief is a blessing. This however becomes a pain too, since you will need to give more feedback during the contest run time for the designers to be able to reproduce designs close to your requirement.
A large number of designers and extra options for the contest offer a good motivation for designers to participate, and the privacy policy is solid. We were highly impressed in our DesignContest review to notice that they’ve improved the brief process and also improved customer communication and service. Also, be sure to read between the lines for the money-back guarantee as the platform is strict and requires you to follow certain mandatory steps in order for you to be eligible for a refund.
It’s time to give one of the best design contest sites a try. Click below to go to DesignContest & get that perfect graphic design for your business.
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9 Comments
Great to work with. Kind, and patient. Would be happy to recommend my designer.
great work!
Love Design Contest. Great community of ideas and talent.
Fantasic experience. Second time through and I got a wonderful set of options this time. Very appreciative of all the artists and designers who submitted very unique ideas.
I love the idea of the Design Contest and I was really surprised how well it worked. We got many ideas and designs from different designers, much more than we expected. Everything went smoothly and the service is great. I would absolutely recommend it.
Great design!
Would definitely recommend this site to my friends and family. Great experience.
Definitely worth trying out. I got a great deal on Design Contest. Got my Logo Design & Business Card Design in less than $350. And having tried a couple other design platforms earlier, I must say there interface is one of the most easy to use. Happy with the results I got.
5 stars to the super-easy customer interface, I was pretty confused going in for my business card design, but Design Contest made it look like a cakewalk. Super happy with my results and experience.