Normally, I review unlimited graphic design services here on ServiceList. This time around, I wanted to step a little outside of my comfort zone. 99designs still positions itself alongside other services like Penji and Design Pickle, but with a unique twist: crowdsourcing.
Nowadays, other sites like Designhill and Designcrowd have popped up, but 99designs is the O.G. I tried out 99designs for this review, but I hit a major snag: I didn’t get any designs.
To be clear, this isn’t just a hit piece—it’ll still be a complete 99designs review. My main goal here is to showcase how they handled the situation, which was not really their fault. Let’s back it up a little.
A brief history of 99designs
99designs has a more storied history than your average design company. The journey begins in 1999, when Matt Mickiewicz and Mark Harbottle launched SitePoint, a forum and learning resource for web developers.
Forums were a breeding ground for innovation in the early ‘00s, and SitePoint was no exception. Users started creating competitions, where each of them would create a website for a fictional project and compete to see whose was best.
By 2005, this spun off into SitePoint Marketplace, where people could submit real design contests for a fee. Two years later, Mickiewicz and Hardbottle spun off the marketplace into its own service, 99designs.
The contest-based design platform saw continued growth from there, until it was bought out by Cimpress in October 2020. Nowadays, it’s under the umbrella of another Cimpress brand: Vistaprint.
How does 99designs work?
Similar to Fiverr, any freelancer can be a 99designs designer. The difference is that rather than picking a designer individually, you submit your request to the whole community, and any designer can work on it.
(Actually, you can also pick a designer individually. But that’s new.)
We’ll get more in-depth as we go on, but basically, you submit your request, pay upfront, and every designer on 99designs will have a chance to see it. Whichever design you select, that designer gets the prize money, and you can keep in touch with them for future designs.
My experience with 99designs
From the beginning, I knew this wouldn’t be like my other reviews. Since it’s not an unlimited service, I had to tweak my scoring system. It took me quite a while to figure out the right approach, especially with some of the caveats around their refund policy.
I decided to review 99designs along 4 lines: value, user experience, communication, and design quality.
Is 99designs worth the money? (Pricing, refunds, design packages)
99designs pricing
Where subscription services are usually split into a few simple tiers, 99designs offers different pricing for every project. A contest for a banner ad starts at just $49, while a 3D design starts at $449.
To make things even more complicated, there are 4 different pricing tiers for every contest:
- Bronze - Expect around 30 designs.
- Silver - Expect around 40 designs.
- Gold - Expect around 50 designs. Mid- and top-level designers only.
- Platinum - Expect around 40 designs. Top-level designers only. Dedicated account manager, prioritized support.
For this review, I created a simple logo project at the Bronze tier—$299. It feels worth noting that none of these tiers claim to offer anywhere close to 99 designs.
What do you get for your money from 99designs?
In short? It depends. There’s really no guarantee that you’ll actually get any designs—as we’ll get into later. That’s why, when you create your brief, even after you’ve selected your package, you’ll be encouraged to purchase a number of add-ons to ensure your project gets seen.
The idea is that, given the sheer number of designers on 99designs (they claim 1.4 million), chances are that a few of them will work on your project, even if you don’t promote it. But once again, there’s no guarantee, so if you really want a good design, you need to level up.
The free add-on that’s supposedly the most effective is making your contest guaranteed. It makes sense: designers are more likely to work on a contest if they know they can actually win it. Of course, you’re still not guaranteed a design even if you guarantee a prize, and you lose the ability to request a refund.
Does 99designs offer refunds?
Yes—with some restrictions. You can receive a full, guaranteed refund as long as…
- You haven’t guaranteed a prize
- You haven’t selected your finalists
- You started your contest in the past 60 days
The real catch here is that a non-guaranteed contest is not likely to yield great designs. This is what the site itself says, but I decided not to guarantee for two reasons:
- I didn’t want to blow $300 on a logo that I wasn’t going to use anyway.
- I was curious what level of design I’d get on the most basic, bare-bones design package.
99designs user experience (Signing up, dashboard, features)
Signing up for a subscription service is usually straightforward: you pick a plan, put in your payment information, and enter the dashboard.
With 99designs, it’s a little different. You have to find the right design landing page, then select a plan. You create an account and fill out your project brief before finalizing your payment.
While the process isn’t as intuitive, the site is certainly well-designed. It guides you step-by-step through the process of creating your project, including:
- Selecting sample designs in a style you like
- Defining your brand style with a series of sliding scales
- Choosing a few colors to include
- Filling out your design brief
- Selecting optional add-ons
- Answering survey questions
99designs design brief
In case you didn’t know, the “brief” is the form you fill out to submit a request through a creative service. All the design services have them; some are more bare-bones, others are specific to what type of design you request.
This is one of the big differences between a one-off service like 99designs and an unlimited service like Manypixels. Every category has its own process, so it’s easier for the forms to be tailored to the exact request.
While the form itself is pretty standard, the questions leading up to it help make the request more well-rounded. When a service goes the extra mile to make sure their designers are as informed as possible, it shows a level of care.
I especially like these brand style sliders, which I haven’t seen on any other service. It’s tough to say if my designers actually took them into account, but they make it feel more thorough.
The 99designs dashboard
Once you finish your request, you arrive at the dashboard. This is where you can view your brief, see your designs, and message designers directly. It’s a well-designed platform that succeeds in feeling like part of the 99designs website rather than a separate app.
It also has a few unique features: design contests are public, so you can share a link to get more eyes on it. They also make it unbelievably easy to edit your brief, something most services I’ve tried don’t even have an option for.
At this point in my journey, I was fairly impressed. I didn’t like all the pricing add-ons and strings attached, but my sign-up experience was pretty smooth, and I was happy with the features and performance of the 99designs platform. Then, things took a turn.
99designs communication (customer support, designers, cancellation)
I got about four marketing emails on the day I signed up for 99designs, which made me think I was in for an onslaught. Thankfully(?), things let up quite a bit after that.
The way 99designs works, there’s a 4-day qualifying round during which designers submit their work. After that, you have an additional 4 days to select the winner. I assume this timeline varies depending on your project, but that’s how it is for logos, which are one of the more basic graphic design types.
After the first day, I didn’t receive anything in my inbox except when I got a new update from a designer. And, well…
What happens when you don’t get any designs?
I started my design contest on a Thursday and checked back in on Monday, hoping to see what the designers at 99designs had cooked up. My expectations weren’t high; I knew that a non-guaranteed Bronze contest with no promotion wouldn’t attract many high-end designers.
What I couldn’t expect, or at least what 99designs didn’t prepare me for, is that I didn’t receive a single design at all. In fact, I only received two things during my 4-day qualifying round. One was an incomprehensible message from a designer:
“is that dragons in pixel?”
In hindsight, I think this was referring to the pixelated Space Invaders alien featured in the logo I submitted for a redesign. Clearly, English is not this person’s first language, but at the time, I didn’t know what to do with this message.
The other thing I received was an email from 99designs telling me that it was time to pick my finalists. Only when I logged in did I realize that I didn’t have any.
99designs customer support and cancellation
As you can see above, 99designs’ suggested remedy for not receiving any designs is contacting support.
I don’t want to under-stress this: when you’ve paid for a graphic design and you haven’t received it, something’s gone wrong. It’s an obvious flaw in 99designs’ model, and it’s bizarre that they don’t have any built-in fixes for it.
To be fair, maybe it doesn’t happen that often. Maybe I just got unlucky. But the fact that the design brief puts so much emphasis on how paying for add-ons and higher-tier designs (or forgoing your refund) makes designers more likely to participate tells me they’ve definitely thought about it.
When I talked to customer service, they got back to me 12 hours later. Not the worst, but again, I was dealing with a pretty serious issue. They did quickly offer a solution: they’d reopen my contest and add a promotion booster pack free of charge. Sounds good, right?
But I’ve worked with less reliable companies in the past, and the thought occurred to me, what if I can’t get a refund? I asked if I’d still be able to get my refund and my representative assured me that I would… 12 hours later, once again.
When it did come time to request my refund, things went much smoother. They didn’t try to stonewall me, as I feared they might, and they processed it within 24 hours. All in all, good communication.
Now, what happened with the contest?
99designs design quality
The request I made was for a new logo for Pulp Friction, a podcast about pop culture debates. I attached the podcast’s current logo as well as a picture of the host. For reference, here’s the podcast’s actual logo.
When they reopened my contest, I was a little nervous to look at it. I didn’t know what I would do if I still didn’t get any designs. I started to wonder if the site had become a ghost town.
Thankfully, when I checked back in, I had received 16 designs, and it was time for me to select my finalists. My request was pretty broad, so I got a good mix of simple and complex, formal and fun. Some designs kept the old colors while others tried out new ones.
On the other hand, I didn’t really get what I was sold. Remember, the pricing page suggested I’d get 30-50 designs, and the name suggests as many as 99. The promotion packs promise an increase of up to 40%. While anything’s an improvement on zero, I got all those promotions, and I still ended up with 16 designs, 9 of which were from the same designer.
Can you get good designs with 99designs?
These two examples represent the range of designs I got.
On the left, you have a simple text-based logo that keeps little from the original design (or from my request). On the right, a detailed illustration that incorporates elements of the host’s unique look and the OG logo.
With 99designs, the designs you get are really dependent on how much you’re willing to spend. That’s how it is with graphic design in general, but as you can see here, it is possible to get a few good designs on the lowest tier… with boosts.
That’s the thing. I really don’t know how common it is to get zero designs with the most bare-bones package, but it’s clearly a possibility. They were quick to help me address this issue (after I threatened a refund), and I’d say the quality here is fairly on par with what I would’ve gotten from many design services.
But that’s just it. On the most basic pricing plan for 99designs—which can still cost several hundred dollars!—there is no guarantee that you’ll get a single design.
This is an inherent problem with design contests: you can’t force anyone to make a design. But I was struck by how 99designs, the biggest and oldest design contest website, still hasn’t figured it out.
What sets 99designs apart from other services?
For a long time, 99designs’ unique selling point was its design contest model. Now, it has some competition in that field. Still, it could easily be argued that their huge network of freelancers and streamlined process, both of which come from nearly two decades in the business, are its key features.
Nowadays, unlimited design is definitely a more affordable option, but 99designs solves a different problem. When you get a design from someone, whether it’s an agency, subscription service, freelancer, or in-house designer, you don’t really have anything to compare it to.
99designs is the antidote to design FOMO. You can see how different designers respond to your prompt and easily select the one that’s most aligned with your needs.
Who is 99designs best for?
Basically, 99designs is perfect for perfectionists. For instance, if you need a logo for your brand, a cover for your book, or a website redesign, you might not need a whole unlimited service, but you want to make sure this one design is done right. Through crowdsourcing, you can see a wide range of interpretations and pick out the one that’s closest to your vision.
If you like your designer, you can connect with them for future projects. But in general, given how long it takes and how much it costs, I can’t say 99designs is a sustainable long-term solution for most.
99designs pros and cons
Pros
- Design variety
- Well-designed website
- Edit your request at any time
- Clever rating system
- Message designers directly
Cons
- Pricey
- Slow process
- Poor transparency
- Upselling
- You might not get any designs
99designs review scorecard
Value: In some cases, one design from 99designs costs more than a month of designs from an unlimited service. For that price, you get a smooth experience and the power of choice. It’s worth a try if you can afford it, but it’s far from a bargain and the results can be just as hit-or-miss as any other design service. 2/5
User experience: This is where 99designs excels most. Over 15 years, they’ve developed a smooth-running and intuitive design experience with a perfect balance of simplicity and detail. I was especially struck by how seamlessly you can edit your prompt while your contest is active. 5/5
Communication: 99designs’ customer support is professional. You message them with a problem, they get back to you with a solution, even if it takes a little longer. That being said, the upselling on already-expensive plans and lack of transparency bring this score down. 3/5
Design quality: Since 99designs is a freelance hub, the quality of designs varies. However, my experience did prove that you can get fairly high-quality designs, even for a non-guaranteed contest at the Bronze level. 4/5
Overall, 99designs delivers on its promises, but there are flaws with the design contest model. They compensate for high prices and inevitable issues with great support and a sleekly-designed platform. It’s not a long-term solution, but it’s a helpful tool for the indecisive that’s worth trying out if you can afford it.
Final score: 3/5 👍
