Even before I had a solid business plan, I was fixated on obtaining the perfect logo design for my new diamond price tracker website called The Diamond App. Consequently, I turned immediately to 99designs to have my website’s logo designed.
My 99designs review will explain to you:
- What 99designs is
- How much 99designs costs
- My personal experience with a 99designs logo design contest
What Is 99designs?
99designs is a contest driven, crowd-sourced design website. A community of graphic designers from around the world compete to design the perfect logo for your business. You choose the winning design and the winner gets paid. As a result, you walk away with a logo that you love, the winning designer gets rewarded, and the other designers gain more design experience.
Why is it Called 99designs?
A traditional designer may provide multiple design concepts for a single project. The downside here is that you are consequently limited to a single designer’s experience and skills.
With 99designs, whether you receive exactly 99 designs submissions or not, you are getting multiple design submissions from multiple designers. Each designer has his or her own style and set of skills which is extremely valuable.
Perhaps it’s called 99designs because you are expected to receive 99 logo design concepts. If that’s the case, then my logo design contest exceeded expectations with 245 logo designs submitted from 43 unique designers!
How Does 99designs Work?
While 99designs offers designs for T-shirts, book covers, billboards, and more, this review of 99designs will focus on logo design.
First of all, keep in mind that 99designs will try to up-sell you throughout the logo design contest creation with upgrades and bundles. While these may seem like attractive options, remember that a logo for your business or website is the end goal.
After you click on the “Get started” button on 99designs.com, you will find the “Logo design” option about a quarter of the way down the page. To assess your style preference, you are asked to select between 3 and 10 of your favorite logos. In addition, you have the option to choose a color scheme for your logo.
Finally, you will fill out a logo design brief. The logo design brief ask you about your business, industry, and target audience. You can also optionally include a slogan in your logo design here.
How Much Does 99designs Cost?
99designs offers four fixed pricing packages for a logo design contests. The options are Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum for $299, $499, $799, and $1,199 respectively.
However, these “fixed” pricing packages should not dictate your budget. There is an option available to choose how much you would like to spend on the logo design contest. Just look for the button below the pricing table that says “I want to create a custom package” and you will be able to choose an arbitrary amount like $450.
Which 99designs Pricing Package Is the Best?
Choosing the right pricing package is tough, especially if you are constrained by a tight budget. As you can see from the pricing table above, the more expensive pricing packages will get more design submissions and more experienced designers.
That is not to say that you will like a top level designer’s work better than a mid level designer. For all you know, you may like an entry level designer’s design better than a top level designer.
I ended up choosing the Gold package, which at the time in late 2015 also included a dedicated manager. I felt like this package had the right balance between design quality and number of design concept submissions.
Most importantly, all packages include a 100% money-back guarantee and full copyright ownership of the final design.
How Long Is a 99designs Contest?
The standard duration for a 99designs logo design contest is 7 days. You will have to pay a premium to have a shorter duration. For example, if you need a logo in 24 hours, you will pay an extra $79.
Every situation is different, but I don’t recommend speeding up the logo design contest. It’s better to allow design concepts to roll in over the course of a week and slowly evaluate each design.
In fact, I extended my design competition an extra 3 days to ensure I saw as many design concepts as possible before making my final decision.
My 99designs Logo Design Contest
I decided to crunch some numbers and perform an analysis of the designers who participated in my logo design contest. Here are the results from my analysis.
- 60% of designers submitted more than 2 designs
- The average number of logo design submissions per designer was 5.7
- The most logo designs submitted by a single designer was 27
- The 5 designers who I chose as finalists had 5 or more design submissions
- The winner submitted 17 logo designs
Part of the reason many of the finalists had so many design submissions is because 99designs counts subsequent revisions to a design as a new design submission.
This is not to say that a single designer doesn’t submit multiple unique logo concepts. Many designers submit many completely different designs while other designers will submit multiple designs that have subtle variations such as a different colors or shading techniques.
The Winning 99designs Logo Design
After 10 days of reviewing logo designs, I ended up choosing kevLogo’s design as the winning design. I love everything about this logo design: the color scheme, the abstract design of the diamond, the magnifying glass cutout of of diamond.
In addition to being a diamond price tracker, The Diamond App is a diamond search engine. The magnifying glass in the logo does a good job of representing the idea of searching. I also like how the thin, white letters in the words “The” and “App” contrast with the thicker, blue letters of “Diamond.”
Start Your Own 99designs Logo Contest
Are you looking for a custom logo for you website or business, but don’t have any idea what your logo should look like? Start your own 99designs logo design contest and receive hundreds of designs ideas from designers around the world. That’s exactly what I did, and my experience with 99designs was fantastic.
Therefore if you are considering 99designs as a platform to have your logo designed and you found my review of 99designs helpful, please use my referral link below to start your logo design contest today.
Let me know if you have any questions about 99designs logo design contests in the comments below and I will be happy to help!