DesignCrowd Review

DesignCrowd is an online marketplace that connects users with graphic designers from around the world. Users of the site can host a design contest for their project and crowd-source the task to anyone on the site who is interested in competing. Designers are encouraged to apply for contests for many reasons, with the amount of prize money being one of the main deciding factors.

We decide to find out a little more about DesignCrowd and find out exactly how their logo contests can help businesses and individuals that need logo designs. The following report includes a company profile, details on how their service works and details on their guarantee policy. Lastly we have included a few links to some independent user reviews, complaints and comments that we found on the web.

Overview

Designcrowd.com is a crowd-sourcing site that is based in New South Wales, Australia. It was launched in 2008 by Alec Lynch with the name DesignBay and was renamed DesignCrowd in 2009. They have received positive coverage from several Australian media sources including the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review. Check out DesignCrowd's pages on Twitter and Facebook.

Products and Services

While Design Crowd focus on design contests in general, logo design is one of their main areas. Other areas include posters, T-shirts, illustrations, websites, stationery, posters and more.

The service that they offer people is the right to hold a design contest on their platform. This gives contest holders access to designers that they would otherwise not be able to reach.

While they have not managed to attract the huge volume of designers to the site that 99designs.com has, they still had a respectable 38,959 signed up at the time that we checked. They boast of an average of 103 design submissions for each logo contest.

How it Works

The process of holding a logo design contest begins with the contest holder completing a brief. On DesignCrowd.com you just have to answer a few questions that will let designers know how they should go about creating a design that is right for you.

There are a variety of price packages that you can order that range from $240 to $940 and a $40 posting fee is also charged. Keep in mind that if you go with a more expensive package your contest is likely to attract more designers. The more expensive packages on the site are also more heavily promoted to the community via Twitter and other means.

You can choose to make your contest private if you like. This means that only designers can see it and it won't be displayed in search engines for your competitors or anyone else to find.

Once your contest is launched you will start to receive design concepts from creative people in numerous different countries. Your job is to then help them perfect their designs by eliminating concepts that you don't like, rating them and offering feedback.

The last step of the process is to enter the 'design handover' phase by selecting a winner and making any final requests for revisions. Once you have approved and downloaded your files payment will be released to the winner.

Guarantee Policies

DesignCrowd have a user agreement and refund policy on their site and we strongly encourage you to read these before you make any payment to the site.

They do offer a 100% money back guarantee but we discovered that there are conditions attached and that not everyone will be eligible. While prize money is refundable, posting fees and upgrade fees are not.

It also seems that you can also not receive a refund if you have guaranteed your contest. If you guarantee your contest then you are letting designers know that you are serious and will not refund. If designers know that a contest will have a definite winner they are more likely to consider entering and putting some time into their entry.

User Reviews

We conducted a thorough search online to see what we could find out about DesignCrowd.com. While you can never fully believe what you read online we nevertheless thought that some links to consumer reviews, complaints and other kinds of feedback would be beneficial to you if you are looking for a logo contest site. We have found very little on this company so far but we'll be adding to this list of references over time.

1) We found some DesignCrowd reviews on a site called CompanyNameSucks.com. Many of the brief complaints here were from the designers perspective but there were some from the customers (contest holders) perspective.

Overall Rating - 5th Place

To visit the website for DesignCrowd - www.designcrowd.com