99designs blog

We are pleased to announce that we are sponsoring SitePoint’s giveaway of Corrie Haffly’s awesome Photoshop book: The Photoshop Anthology 101. It’s a great book, well worth a read!

The other major news is we are launching our first (of many) giveaways for designers. We are giving away a free MacBook to one designer who submits a winning design before June 20th. Any design that is submitted and selected as a winner before that date is in the running. We will be selecting a shortlist of 50 designs and then you guys will vote for the winning design.

*update* the site is back up

We are having problems with one of our database servers, should be back shortly.

You might have already noticed the new contest health badges on contests, which show contests as either “healthy”, “caution” or in extreme cases “unhealthy”. If you click the badges (or the more details link) you will get a brief summary of the contest details, along with some indicators of how healthy a contest is, such as when recent feedback was given or whether the contest holder has a history of prize awarded contests.

The system behind this has a long list of things it checks to determine this health score, but it basically all comes down to trying to determine if this contest is a good bet to enter. Initially it is just another piece of information that designers can use to help choose a contest to enter, but depending on how it’s used we might consider actually preventing entries for unhealthy contests.

The rules underneath the hood are actually fairly complex (seems my maths teacher wasn’t lying about needing stats one day), so we will be adjusting them over the next 24 hours or so. Let us know what you think!

Seeing as the blog posts have been a great way of getting feedback from you guys about what direction you want to see 99designs going in, we thought we would create a UserVoice page to let you guys vote on exactly what features take priority.

Forums are also on the way, plus some neat new ways of informing designers about the state of contests and contest holders past history. Keep an eye out tomorrow afternoon!

We are trialing a new type of contest called Guaranteed Contests. A guaranteed contest has had the prize paid in full to 99designs and the contest holder has guaranteed that they will award a winner. 99designs will pay the winner directly via a number of common payment methods (PayPal preferred).

You can tell a guaranteed contest by the “guaranteed” badge in the contest status bar, (check out the very first guaranteed contest for Destiny, 1445 entries and counting!). Initially we will be handling most of the details by hand, for instance contacting contest holders to arrange upgrading to a guaranteed contest and organizing the exchange of design and prize money via email, so we are keen to hear your feedback on what you would like to see to make this process easier.

As a way of promoting our winning designers (of whom we are very proud), we have added a section on the Find Contests page listing designers who have recently won a contest. Check it out at tell us what you think!

We have just deployed another minor release with some improvements you guys have been asking for:

• Improved contest brief stylings
• Less light grey text
• Private message link in the top right is highlighted when you have messages
• Increased line spacing across the site
• Improved some styles around the place

It has come to our attention that there is a problem uploading designs in Opera. We are working on a fix.

Stay tuned for some exciting changes to how contests are run, which will hopefully mean less abandoned contests.

SitePoint has published an interview with Xavier, the designer that we worked with for most of the 99designs site.

Check it out, it’s an interesting read.

We have just uploaded another release containing emails to let designers know they have new feedback and also the image preview system that we used in the previous design.

Let us know what you think about the image previews, they are particularly useful in the feedback links, as the design links (e.g #34, #124) show a preview of the entry in question.

Additional tweaks and bug fixes:

• Withdrawn entries are no longer displayed on the Designer pages, this is the first in a series of fixes that will ensure that withdrawn entries aren’t available in any shape or form.
• Watchlist now has a remove checkbox!
• A variety of minor bug fixes

Well, the last blog post certainly was popular. It’s been a busy 24 hours, but I think a productive one. A special thanks to everyone who gave us clear, well thought out feedback, it makes it much easier to implement! The list of changes deployed today:

• A more muted shade of orange (for those of you that don’t wear sunglasses)
• Improved images on the front page, contest page and profile page
• Restructured the “My Contests” page, moved Watched Contests to the top and linked Entered Contests directly to designer pages
• Improved contest search
• Rejected entries are shown in contest listings, but greyed out
• Added a list of categories as links under Find Contests, with a page for each category
• Added payment methods to Contest Brief
• Fixed a bug where contest times were displayed incorrectly
• Fixed a bug where ratings didn’t work
• Fixed a bug where IE7 users couldn’t leave comments

Things coming soon:

• Improvements in the My Watchlist, ability to edit the title and remove entries from the list easily
• Crumbtrails in Contest pages and Designer Pages
• Improved formatting in the briefs, specifically ones where contest holders pasted from MS Word
• Much, much more.

That said, it is now the weekend in Australia. Think it might be time for our first full day off since February. Enjoy your weekends!