My experience with 99designs for landing page
Recently I decided to give 99designs a try to get a landing page designed for my project imgnet.io. Thought I would share my experience with the rest of you IHs.
Here is the TL/DR.
- It probably best to find a designer that has already done something similar to what you looking for and work with them one-on-one.
- If you are going to run a contest kick it off during the week, and not before the weekend.
- You get what you pay for so consider a higher prize.
- If you not getting the results you expected ask for an extension
Originally I kicked things off on Friday evening at the bronze package level ($349). Designers have four days to submit concepts and at the bronze level, 99designs states that you will receive approx. 15 designs. However, after three days in, I only received three designs that were not up to expectation. I decided to email support asking if it was possible to update the prize money to the gold package ($899) and restart things. The support agent on the email said since the project had already started nothing could be done. Luckily I got hold of a live chat agent who was really helpful. He informed me that the reason for low entries was due to the fact that the competition was submitted on a Friday and most designers work during the week. Long story short he extended the project for an extra four days and pointed me in the right direction to set up a custom prize amount.
After pushing the prize money up, and refining the design brief more, I started getting much better quality designs. I worked closely with a few designers providing feedback, but close to the end of the competition one designer submitted a concept I really liked and decided to go with that concept.
Even though I was lucky enough to have landed on a design I really liked I still feel a better result could have been achieved working one-on-one with a single designer.
I also made the mistake of starting a contest on a Saturday and got pretty poor results.
Also, a lot of the top designers that you might want to work with will be allergic to doing contests, so 99designs notion that you start a contest and then invite designers you like to it will be met with no response from those invited designers. So all in, there seems to be a lot of cultural 'rules' that you only find out after the fact.
So I'd really recommend browsing for a long time, finding a designer or two that you really like, then approach them directly.
Coudn't agree more!
Useful tips. Thanks for sharing.
May I ask how your design brief looked in the end? (Was it mostly a text document or did you have other sample assets as well)
Mostly a text document outlining the following:
Awesome. Thank you.
I am in no way having a go at 99designs; it is a place to get many options relatively quickly, but please excuse my ignorance, is $899 on 99 Designs overly expensive?
It's been a while since I've been to the platform, but I understand that people do the work then submit it in the hope of being paid for it. If you are a good designer who charges $75 an hour, $900 would be 12 hours. That's a significant amount of time to invest in the off chance you'll get paid. My feeling is what is more likely to happen is someone spending 1-2 hours designing a page using prebuilt resources (either of their designs or sourced from a template site). $450 an hour is a lot to pay for that type of work.
On the other hand, if you are time-poor, this price might be less than spending your own time sourcing a good looking landing page from somewhere like theme forest then hiring a dev to customise it.
Can I ask what lead you to use 99 Designs? Was it suggested, the easiest option available, something else?
Usually, I would work directly with a designer, but this time I thought to give the 99Designs contest a try to have a few concepts to work with. A few years back I heard good things about 99Designs but this was more for book cover and logos. I guess we were lucky to land on a design we liked, but I wouldn't take this approach again.
That's the dream result. Getting a product you like with the budget you were comfortable with.
well, i like the design.
fwiw, i will never understand how fivvvveeerrrrrr works. :-/
What was the process like after?
Who built the site?
What images did they provide etc?
Most of the images were stock photos that we purchased, and the designer put together. I hired a front-end developer on fiverr to convert the PSD to HTML, made some minor tweaks myself and finally hosted on Netlify.
Looks like it was in Tailwind, did you search for tailwind on fiverr?
Yes, I did.