Crowdsourced Graphic Design Marketplace: DesignCrowd
It is sometimes the lack of inspiration or resources or being too busy, there is usually a moment that every designer, developer & creative agency wishes the touch of a magic hand that would create for them.
DesignCrowd, a marketplace for graphic design & creative services, can be what you're looking for & more.
It is a web-based service that helps you to get multiple custom designs for a project (~20-100) via crowdsourcing.
The service has 2 ends, you can be the "client designed for" or the designer (or both):
Outsource Your Design Works – outsource.designcrowd.com
This is the place to reach 12,000 designers & outsource design jobs like PSD web design, logo design, etc.
Outsourcing is completely turn on & off, no setup fees, monthly payments, etc.
It is very straight forward & results are received in a few steps:
- post a brief of your project
- get multiple designs from designers, ask for revisions & create a short list
- show the designs to your client via a white labelled web interface, email or PDF
- choose the best design
- that's all
The service is white labelled which means you can brand it however you like & present to your clients as your interface.
Jobs For Designers – jobs.designcrowd.com
This is where the design jobs & a number of contests exist.
It is a very ideal place to make a good use of free time to build a portfolio on real projects & earn money by participating into jobs posted.
You can select from a list of jobs & submit any number of designs to increase the chance of being selected as the winner. You can also find multi-quote jobs and submit quotes.
Although the winner is awarded with the project budget, there are also participation payments where you can be paid even if a design submitted is not selected.
Conclusion
DesignCrowd, with how it works & the community it has, can be a time-saver for anyone in search of a designer that can create 10s of designs to choose from in a very short time.
After digging DesignCrowd in detail, I really think that every design-related person can find a use of it.
To find out what type of a design quality to expect, there is a list of top designers which you can see what they have already created.
- Tags:
Logo Outsource PSD
- Filed under: Extras, Other License, Reviews & Giveaways
- 7 Comments
7 Responses for "Crowdsourced Graphic Design Marketplace: DesignCrowd"
I like this. Very powerful. A number of advantages over outsourcing marketplaces and design contest sites.
I particularly like what they’re doing with participation payments. Is subtle but seems like they’re actually making an effort to make design contests sustainable and fair. Don’t think it’s quite there yet (participation payments are $20). Could be a bit higher but when some projects are 0.5hrs work that will at cover cost of time in.
$250 for website designs?
$70 logo projects?
Pure evil.
good. i will try this
NO NO NO and NO again!
I don’t have time right now to launch another lengthy post about WHY crowdsourcing/contests/spec work is bad–for client and designers alike. But you can investigate the following links:
http://www.no-spec.com/
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/07/interview-with-specwatch-the-naked-truth-about-design-contests/#comments
i tried it and i loved it!
didn’t win my first project but was payed a participation payment. they still look to be growing but i think there is more here than just the same old specwork website.
DesignCrowd is EXTREMELY biased towards the clients. They do not care how much time and effort designers put into their work. DesignCrowd doesn’t reinforce any timeliness of client responses and feedback and they don’t even make sure that clients pick a winner at the end of the contest!! If you really want to know for yourself, go ahead and create an account on DesignCrowd. You will see several “closed” contests that are waaaayyyyyyyy past the deadline but have no winner chosen. What about all the designers who spent all of their time doing work? The least DesignCrowd could do is enforce a policy that clients HAVE to choose a winner, especially if the payment is guaranteed. It is unfair to everyone BUT DesignCrowd because they make money either way. There is nothing wrong with spec work as long as the company who is the middleman does it fairly.
The designs submitted are way below standards. We chose a Guaranteed Project option by mistake and now we are forced to choose designs that are terrible and to pay for it! Even worse, Emily from Design Crowd actually tells you that you don’t get to have your money back but they can extend the deadline further for you so that you can get more submissions without considering that the client also has time running on his hands! In our situation, we gave the contest 10days and we received 95% of really unfavorable designs. And even the 5% we had to force pick was because we had to pick the lesser of evils to get it moving!