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Comment by Flemlord | Hacker News Reader

I've sucessfully used 99designs.com a few times and it's worked out great each time. With each new design need, I go back to the designers that won our prior contests.

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been designing 99designs for about 2 weeks know and im becoming increasingly frustrated. this blog here http://www.graphicpush.com/99designs-bullshit-20 about sums up all my grievences. what is really depressing is when clients refuse to leave any feedback on a design you spent 5 hours on, merely awarding you one star an not telling you what they dislike about it so you can make changes. you can end up feeling like a whore in a line-up.

i click on some users' folios and i see that even the best of them might have entered 200 contests to have only 5 wins. in short, the only people this is a win for are the founders making off with a cool $40 for each contest started.

I used 99designs for the logo of my latest project and I'm very happy with it. I put up a content and set the prize to $150 (+$39 that 99designs charges) and I started getting logo submissions within hours. By the end of the 7 day contest period I had received 30 submissions from which several were really nice. I highly recommend it for logo designs.

I chose to put the contest for the logo, and then work off-line with the winner to do the rest of the design work.

I've always wanted to use that service but never had the chance to do it. I would love to hear a bit more about your experience.

Ditto. Fancy doing a blog post and submitting it? Admittedly, I'd still tend towards using a designer that we know, but when trying to hook something up on the cheap as a stop-gap it seems like it might be a good solution.

I've used this service once and had a great experience. I needed a logo, had little/flexible requirements, and offered $300. Once my partner and I decided on a design we liked, we checked out the designer's profile and saw all the contests he won in the past, all his submissions, etc. They were all quality - the real deal and not just another guy with a pirated copy of Photoshop. We then contacted him with some minor requests and he made the changes within hours of our email. This process continued for the duration of the contest and it was nothing but a good and easy experience. End result - we got a great logo we love.

Feedback is key to this process! And definitely check out the designer's profile and his other submissions. It's a good way to see their style and if it matches your tastes. Also a good way to see if they just submit a generic logo and just modify the text for each contest they enter.

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