
Why designers need to stop moaning about 99designs.com - jase_coop
http://jasecooper.tumblr.com/post/4158734876/why-designers-should-stop-moaning-about-99designs-com
======
jarin
When designers grouse about losing business to 99designs, they should try to
keep in mind that they're grousing about losing customers who only have $300
to spend on a logo design, or $500 to spend on a web design.

You're really just losing cheap customers. Cheap customers are not fun to work
with.

~~~
jasonkester
Indeed. I can't tell you how much business I've lost over the years as a
result of potential clients going to RentACoder.com. It must be literally
_hundreds of dollars_ by now.

Never ever compete on price. That's rule number one in the consulting
industry. If there's a group of people racing to the bottom on price, then by
definition they're not your competition.

~~~
Jd
Err, from your website:

"We offer... consulting services at rates that are much less than you might
find from other US based software firms"

~~~
jasonkester
Ah, but the firms I'm competing with charge >$300/hr, so I can come in under
them and still make a good living.

You'll notice that nowhere do I say we're prepared to compete against teams of
highschool kids in Bangladesh on price.

~~~
mikeryan
So you only compete on price with those who charge more then you? ;-)

~~~
jasonkester
Sure. It's easier to win that way.

I still like to think I'm competing on quality rather than price. The fact
that I bill less for my time when I've got sand between my toes is frankly a
bit of a gimmick. Some clients see it as a positive that they're contributing
to my suntan.

------
pg
I often recommend 99designs to startups that need logos. For startups, logos
are like domain names: they don't have to be great, just good enough. (E.g.
Google.) And I have never yet seen 99designs fail to deliver in this respect.
Often the startups that use 99designs get better logos than the ones that hire
individual designers for the purpose.

The designers who complain about 99designs remind me of the record labels.
Something you used to charge a lot for, you can no longer charge a lot for.
But things aren't going back.

~~~
alabut
The guys that charge a lot aren't the ones being hurt by 99designs. Business
is fine for me.

It's the younger designers in school or fresh grads that are building their
first portfolio that are being commoditized even more than they already are,
which is why I tell them to do pro bono work for non-profits. Designing for
non-profits is like programming on open source projects - you can
simultaneously gain experience on real work, build your portfolio and give
back to a worthy cause.

They'll get more respect and true client interaction than with the minimum
wage grunt work on crowdsourced competition sites, even if they pay rent by
being a barista until they get their foot in the door somewhere in the
industry, like as a low-level production artist at an ad agency.

~~~
nerfhammer
And there's nothing that says you can't put work brokered through 99designs in
your portfolio

------
danielsiders
For me there's a bigger issue here than price, and it affects a larger market
than just graphic design. I completely support the free market argument, and
when 99designs and crowdspring first came out I viewed them as a great
opportunity for young/inexperienced designers to work on small low-stakes
projects that lacked capital and produce innovative work that would get them
noticed. My experience with both sites and their users in the time since has
dispelled that notion.

Sites like 99designs guarantee a certain number of users will submit entries
for your project. While that's a great way to counter the possibility of low
quality work, it poses a serious problem for designers (and eventually
customers).

In most projects there is only one cash reward. That means if 30 people submit
designs, only one gets paid. From a pure efficiency standpoint that means 30x
the work is being done. Not only is this wildly inefficient, but it eventually
leads to lower quality work overall.

Compare this structure to something like Amazon Mechanical Turk or SETI@home.
In most 'crowdsourced' systems each user contributes value to a project by
performing a small part of the overall work. There is often a small
duplication of efforts to maintain quality and speed when a small number of
users produce aberrant or delayed results. But overall the entire project is
cut into small pieces and distributed to individuals. That's not the case
here. Multiple submissions act as an insurance policy against poor quality
work, but the very nature of the system treats that as the norm.

Requiring a dozen or more submissions suggests the management is aware of this
issue. Higher quality designers will eventually tire of the much higher
workload required to generate returns and migrate to other systems. The longer
this system exists the more it will become the home of an unscrupulous breed
of designers who simply change text from project to project.

Many 'designers' have a collection of 30 'logos' that are basically clip art
that they use for every project. Since the return on their investment is so
low it's not worth creating something new for each project. That leads to
heavily recycled work and what can (and often does) become little more than a
non-automated clip art text replacement tool.

There must be a better system in which creatives can actually divide work
instead of duplicating it, and in so doing create a more valuable final
product. The same problem exists on sites like Victors and Spoils for
advertising

~~~
namdnay
This system also exists in other fields, such as estate agents. Each house on
the market will be listed by about 10 different agencies, yet only sold by
one. So work is multiplied tenfold, and so commissions are high, because
you're also paying the agent for the 9 other houses he didn't sell.

This seems to be a problem that isn't easily solved by market forces: If a new
player enters the field, he has to put margins high, because he will only be
able to close a small fraction of deals. The only solution would be for
someone with sufficient cash reserves to launch a "hard-discount" agency, that
would start making money once its market share starts growing.

------
greendot
I use 99designs, mycroburst, and crowdspring because I can't afford a real
designer now. I'm not "cheap". I understand the trade-off. Once my startup is
making more money, I will invest in a more expensive design but right now, I
just cannot afford it. The same goes for programmers. I will be programming as
much as I can by myself but outsourcing programming tasks to help get the site
done in a reasonable amount of time. Local designers and programmers really do
not want to help out a bootstrap startup. I do not see any alternative at this
point.

~~~
nodata
> I'm not "cheap".

Yes you are, but that doesn't have to be a bad thing. It's right for your
business at its current stage.

~~~
nhangen
There is a difference between being cheap and being frugal.

~~~
lwhi
And in my experience, the proposal with the lowest cost is rarely the least
expensive.

~~~
nhangen
100% agree in most cases.

------
nsfmc
i would argue this isn't a 'free market' problem as professional designers are
probably tackling a different market altogether (pricewise and customerwise).
Instead, i think the problem is that 99designs hurts the public image of
designers in much the same way that rentacoder (and to a lesser extent,
topcoder) does.

Which is to say that the problem with these spec websites is that they
commoditize design (and coding) work in a way which devalues _the process_
behind the trade, which is arguably what you're really paying for.

And say what you will about the quality of the end product, the damage is that
people walk away with the idea that design or programming or whatever is not
_getting there_ it's about _the destination_. For a reason why this is a bad
idea, look at why people wax poetic about _'thoughtful design'_ or any of
those sites that focus on _the details._

It's not that these sites are actually bad and for someone who wants an
aesthetic facelift, i'm sure these are often 100% useful, but the utility and
the domain of applications where something like 99designs is pretty limited,
so i guess you get what you pay for.

------
Nat0
As a part-time designer I have loved having a place to refer clients that see
more value in the number of different ideas that are created, not the
consulting/revision process. For those types, this is the perfect solution.
That is not to say that the quality of the work on 99designs is low, I have
been quite surprised by the quality of some of the stuff on there.

Anything that helps get better design out there is fine by me.

------
famousactress
As the article points out, certainly not a problem specific to design.. In
fact, I wonder how many of the designers who're complaining have taken
advantage of the microstock photography explosion, or turned to flickr for
their stock photography.

------
jeffchuber
I said this on the blog, but 99 designs sells glorified clip art, not design

~~~
roc
And before these types of sites existed, their customers were using _actual_
clip-art instead of hiring designers.

------
Nickste
This post came at a pretty good time for me - I had been considering 99designs
for the next redesign of one of my company's micro-sites.

What alternatives would HN recommend over 99designs? We've got our own coders,
so need nothing more than an actual design/layout.

~~~
jarin
Depending on what you need, you might be able to find something good at
<http://themeforest.net>.

------
BerislavLopac
I can't afford even the 99designs rates, so I created the logo for my startup
-- <http://stellient.com> \-- myself. I searched through
<http://www.istockphoto.com> and found a nice clipart which I tweaked in
Inkscape, combining it with a nice free font from FontSquirrel; and I couldn't
design my way out of a wet paper bag.

That being said, great logo design needn't really be expensive:
<http://misipile.com> has one of the best portfolios I've ever seen, and their
rates are not much higher than the 99designs ones.

~~~
BadCookie
I hate to break this to you, but using art from iStockphoto as a logo is
prohibited. From the license agreement:

"For greater certainty, the following are Prohibited Uses and you may not: ...
4. use any of the Content as part of a trade-mark, design-mark, trade-name,
business name, service mark, or logo;"

------
marknutter
The problem with complaining about people who make a different amount of money
than you is that it's completely relative. While the $100/hr designer bitches
about $10/hr designer "devaluing the market", the $500/hr may be complaining
about the $100/hr designers doing the same thing. Usually, whatever level you
happen to be at will seem to you like it's the ideal level. The same concept
applies to taxes. The tendency is for people to think that people who make
more than they do should be taxed more, while people making less than them
should be taxed less.

------
daemin
I've just been reading the book "23 Things They Don't Tell You About
Capitalism" by Ha-Joon Chong and one thing that I can bring to the table from
that book is the notion of Immigration Control (in chapter 3) as the single
most influential factor in holding wages up in countries. The example he gives
is of a Swedish bus driver being paid 50x as much as an Indian one, where as
they do the same job, just in different places.

Now since anyone in the world can create and submit work for 99designs (as
well as for any other internet / information based agencies) it really levels
out the playing field and removes the barrier of immigration when it comes to
wages. Meaning that information workers (designers in this case) from
developed countries need to add more value to what they are doing than what is
available through sites like 99designs, if they want to continue practicing
their craft.

------
jcl
This designer makes the case that 99designs has created an environment where
plagiarism has few consequences:

[http://www.thelogofactory.com/logo_blog/index.php/copied-
wor...](http://www.thelogofactory.com/logo_blog/index.php/copied-work-entered-
into-99designs-logo-design-contest-again/)

(Although I suppose that that risk might not be enough to rank in the top
issues a startup has to deal with...)

------
robryan
Depends on your business I guess, far more important than a logo to us is the
way we present data in our UI and the app backend, the logo is more of a nice
to have so we used one of these services and were happy with the result.

So yes we are the kind of cheap client a designer would want to avoid at this
stage and these services suit it.

------
lwhi
99designs exploits naivety and exploits economic hardship.

I can't see how the system is different to a pyramid scheme. The majority of
the participants will see no benefit by submitting an 'entry'.

Crowdsourcing has the potential to be enormously beneficial to society - but
the crowdspring / 99design model is unfair.

~~~
webwright
"I can't see how the system is different to a pyramid scheme. The majority of
the participants will see no benefit by submitting an 'entry'."

Just like startups. Or RFPs. With these, the rewards are HUGE so it's worth it
to roll the dice. Unfortunately for Western designers, the amount of money
regular designers are making on 99Designs IS huge for offshore designers.

For speculative work like spec design, startups, or RFPs it's all about the
math-- Cost of Effort * Chance of Winning = Worth it.

~~~
lwhi
Imo, it's not like a startup or a RFP at all - because in these cases those
involved are taking risks which will hopefully lead to _BIG_ gains.

In a contest like this, the participants are simply competing for the chance
to be paid.

I cannot fathom how this scenario can possibly be fair.

~~~
roel_v
What a bunch of whining about 'fair'. It's simply the market at work - nobody
_owes_ you anything, not a certain amount of money per hour, not a certain
amount of work, nothing. As long as there are people who want to do the work
for the payout they get, the system _works_. If you find you can't make enough
money on 99designs, you're free to get a job at McDonalds.

RFP's don't lead to BIG gains either - there are _many_ contracts with a cost
plus model. And most startups fail or whither on for years, with no real
prospects. That's just how it works - don't like it? Feel free to do something
else.

~~~
lwhi
I'm a capitalist, because I feel it's the best system we have. However,
there's obviously a wide spectrum of views that can be ascribed to capitalist
philosophy.

I'm quite happy to be able to state my politics places me at the opposite end
of the spectrum to you.

\--

" _That's just how it works - don't like it? Feel free to do something else._
"

I'm happy to argue to my case - and to disagree with practices that I feel are
unjust or unfair.

Logically and morally - this type of crowd-sourcing involves exploitation. If
you carry out work for someone - logically they _DO_ owe you something.

------
goodgoblin
The nice thing about this is that it gives people who want to break into
'design' a place to get their first jobs perhaps, without having to cultivate
a a flow of contacts. I imagine people who are already experienced designers
will have a more steady and stable body of work from their network.

------
tiddchristopher
I don't trust a designer with a malformed link on his homepage.

------
andyford
This is missing the point. The problem isn't that some designers are losing
work to 99designs. The problem is that spec work devalues the entire design
industry.

~~~
run4yourlives
No, actually you are.

I hate to break it to you but you as a seller do not get much of a say on what
value your product has in the marketplace. This is as true for design as it is
for anything else.

The value of a product is exactly what _buyers_ are willing to pay for it.
Saying things such as "spec work devalues the entire design industry" suggests
clearly that your definition of value is not in line with your customer's
definition.

When this is the case, you basically have two options:

1\. Demonstrate an increased value to the customer that you bring that they
are willing to pay for, or;

2\. Lower your price to compete.

Walling off your industry to preserve profits that aren't in line with the
real value of the product might be desirable but it is unsustainable in the
long run in today's modern world. Ask the music industry.

~~~
Tycho
_Walling off your industry to preserve profits that aren't in line with the
real value of the product might be desirable but it is unsustainable in the
long run in today's modern world. Ask the music industry._

I upvoted for the rest of the comment, but this bit seemed off. Mainly because
the crowd-sourcing idea relies on the respect of copyright even more so than
the music industry.

~~~
run4yourlives
There's a difference between respect of copyright and artificial inflation of
value. The recording industry would have you believe that the consumer is
stupid and has no respect for the value of the artist. This is simply false.

iTunes is a perfect example that given the correct price point, people will
pay for music. The big issue is that price point might not be high enough to
support the massive marketing and promotion machine that exists. That isn't
the consumer's problem though.

In the end, it's actually a perfect example of my point:

When technology reduces the barrier to entry to next to nothing, industries
that were predicated on high barriers need to adapt, or they will die. It's a
good rule of thumb that the moment you start to do something other than
talking to the customer of your service in an effort to preserve revenue, you
have a value disconnect with your market.

~~~
Tycho
Hmm, your argument seems to rest on the conflation of 'barriers of entry' with
'copyright protection.' Consumers can now easily download music illegally -
what's that got to do with barriers for entry? What market players have
successfully exploited lowered entry-barriers?

~~~
run4yourlives
You've heard of itunes, correct? Pandora? Grooveshark?

~~~
Tycho
Pandora is not really a subtitute or rival for the existing business models -
more like a competitor for radio stations. Grooveshark from what I can tell
relies on breaking copyright. Meanwhile iTunes is successful but a) not much
cheaper than CDs and b) only a small portion (combined with the other MP3
stores) of the overall music retail market. So it would appear to me that
music is sold by 'the industry' at a price people _do_ find acceptable, round
about the same price they'd been selling at during their most successful days,
which ended with the popularization of illegal filesharing.

Basically out of all the people who love music, a large subset of them will
pirate it without qualms, and that's all that's really going on here. The
changes brought about by the internet have just shrunk the overall industry,
rather than allow it to be reshaped by visionary businesspeople or artists. 99
Designs works because due to copyright protection designers feel confident
about showing work before receiving payment, meanwhile the music industry is
failing because people feel confident about avoiding the legal sanctions of
downloading copyrighted material. That it should be like that is just an
accident of law enforcement practices and tracibility.

------
dalore
Why wasn't StartupBritain.org a hyperlink? That was the most interesting part
of the post to me.

------
hippich
$300 - for a logo? This is way too expensive. You can hire someone on
oDesk.com for $1/hr =))

~~~
jjm
While you sit on your a$$ and watch him/her slave away?

------
mike10
Should have used www.logobids.com - way better!

------
MenaMena123
99Designs is like a game for the people, if you really don't care much about
the design of the project or logo or whatever it maybe, its great and can do
the job.

If your looking for something exact I wouldn't recommend, hire one good
designer. Its a great startup idea and works well.

