DesignCrowd.com – One of the Best Design Crowdsourcing Sites

Design crowdsourcing isn’t a trend — it’s here to stay. For many businesses, especially those in their early stages, they are the only affordable way to get access to logo and web design services. And for many designers, they’re a great way to get your work in front of potential clients and make money in an increasingly competitive field.

There are plenty of options out there, but which is the best? In my opinion, DesignCrowd stands above the rest — not just for clients, but for designers too. DesignCrowd has fixed the problems with other design crowdsourcing sites: copying; fairness for designers; and disruption of the traditional agency. In this article, we analyze DesignCrowd (a design crowdsourcing site for anything from logo crowdsourcing to WordPress crowdsourcing to print design crowdsourcing) and outline 4 reasons DesignCrowd is the best crowdsourced design site: DesignCrowd is fairer for designers; it prevents copying and group think; it offers white labelling for design agencies; and it offers amazing choice for small business. Read on to find out why.

Reason #1 – Fair Crowdsourcing For Designers

Crowdsourced graphic design has always attracted attention. Some worry that it’s not always fair to designers. DesignCrowd goes out of their way to be the fairest crowdsourcing site out there with a system they call ‘Crowdsourcing 2.0’.

Participation payments are a key part of this system. In traditional crowdsourcing systems, only the ‘1st place’ winner receives any sort of payment. With DesignCrowd, the selected designer still gets the prize money for providing the best solution for the client’s needs, but participation payments are handed out to other designers so that designers get paid for their effort. This leads to a more lucrative system for designers – recently The Next Web featured an Indian web designer that earned $10,000 in 4 weeks on DesignCrowd.

Reason #2 – No Copying

DesignCrowd hides submissions from everyone but the client until the contest closes. On other sites, copying is a big issue, and on occasion it’s the copycat, not the originator, whose work is chosen. DesignCrowd ensures that those who put the time and effort into creating original work are rewarded for that effort.

DesignCrowd does occasionally close designer accounts when standards are below par to ensure clients are getting value for their money. However, the go the extra mile and provide training for those individuals to help them get their work at the right level for commercial competitiveness.

Reason #3 – Agency Friendly White Labelling

DesignCrowd has taking a different approach to other crowdsourcing sites. Instead of being combative with traditional design agencies, DesignCrowd seeks to work with them. They are offering a white label design outsourcing service keeps jobs posted out of Google and other search engines so that agencies can be discrete while still gaining access to a large pool of qualified designers, and makes it easy for agencies to show potential designs to their clients without DesignCrowd branding.

Here’s an example of a white labelled project on DesignCrowd:

The above system makes DesignCrowd attractive to agencies who’ve got too much work on their plates, meaning well-paid jobs for high-profile, reputable clients are often sent to the site. The system above lets agencies, web developers, PR firms and printing companies hook into the DesignCrowd user base (and all the benefits of crowdsourcing) through an interface that can be branded with agency livery.

Reason #4 – higher quality crowdsourcing

For businesses, DesignCrowd is a great place to get plenty of design options on a smaller budget. Businesses can receive over 100 submissions to their contests — in fact, the most attractive contests can end up soliciting many more than that — from which to choose the one design they’ll use in the real world.

Businesses can use the site to service all of their needs, from logo crowdsourcing to website design crowdsourcing and print design crowdsourcing. For newcomers, it’s best to host a logo competition first, so that subsequent web and print contest designers can make use of it in their work.

But that benefit is similar to what you get on other crowdsourcing sites – what makes DesignCrowd better is the quality. Because of its participation system and copying prevention policy, DesignCrowd has attracted a smaller, more loyal and higher quality pool of designers. This is why organizations like Harvard Business School used DesignCrowd crowdsourcing to get their Innovation and Growth Research Center logo. DesignCrowd has developed an invite system to ensure some of their top designers work on every project. They also educate designers who don’t quite live up to standards, which is good for businesses and good for designers.

Alternatives (Sites like DesignCrowd)

DesignCrowd’s competitors don’t emphasize fairness for all designers and provide participation payments for those who don’t win the top prize. These competitors aren’t interested in keeping the quality of submissions high, or educating those designers who aren’t ready for the prime time. Sure, clients might get the odd great design on these other sites, but they won’t receive a large batch of top-notch work like those using DesignCrowd will.

For both designers and for clients, DesignCrowd is without a doubt the fairest crowdsourcing site and the highest quality design crowdsourcing site.