Creating opportunities: connecting client and designer

Twanna Hines is a sex, dating and relationships writer in New York City who earlier this year ran a logo project on 99designs for her site FunkyBrownChick.com.

Twanna loved the fact that she was able to tap into a global talent pool and develop a relationship with a designer that she would have never been exposed to otherwise. She liked working with the designer, Marianaa, so much that in addition to the logo, Twanna contracted her to put together letterhead as well as several envelope configurations.

I was able to catch up with Twanna and ask her about her experience.

high profile design opportunity for a great cause

Designers…

Here is a fantastic opportunity to help a truly great cause with a logo for a high profile, national campaign.

Your logo design could become the face of the fair trade movement for years to come.

Fair Trade Towns, USA is a national campaign to build a strong, broad-based consumer demand for Fair Trade products and businesses. It is a community-based organizing campaign designed to provide the organizing resources to local activists to get their town or city officially declared a “Fair Trade Town”.

The aim is for this designation to provide a platform for long-term campaign activity to raise awareness and demand for Fair Trade, thereby facilitating life-changing benefits for impoverished farmers and workers across Africa, Asia and Latin America.

So read the brief carefully:
http://99designs.com/contests/23904/brief

…and then fire up those creative juices.

Good Luck!
The 99designs Team

Help redesign Canada’s #1 most trafficked website

Hey Designers,

Cool opportunity to help redesign Canada’s #1 trafficked website and one of the largest music websites online.

No coding necessary and the prize is over $1000.

Check it out here.

Good Luck!

The 99designs Team

99designs co-founder Matt Mickiewicz on Mixergy

Ever wonder what it takes to get a concept to a fully profitable business?

Andrew Warner of Mixergy has just posted a great interview with Matt Mickiewicz, co-founder of both 99designs.com and SitePoint.com, where Matt shares his insights on what it took to get 99designs up, running and profitable.

Check it out here:
How 99designs Built A $5+ Million Marketplace In 16 Months. – With Matt Mickiewicz

Maintenance period for faster emails

From the department of small but nice improvements…

In the past, there’s been a minute or two delay in us sending you emails to let you know what’s going on. We don’t like keeping you waiting so after a short period of maintenance, we’ll be sending out emails instantly – no more delays.

UPDATE: we’re back online with speedy email delivery, after a very brief maintenance period of a couple of minutes.

99designs featured on Good Morning America

Great News!

99designs was recently featured on Good Morning America!

Watch the Clip

The more attention we can bring to the site…the more businesses will run contests…the more money will be available to the design community.

Cheers Everyone,

The 99designs Team

slick new contest launch interface

Today we launched a redesign of the “launch a contest” interface to make it cleaner, more attractive and even easier to use. We think you’ll agree it looks a lot better.

Contest types are now grouped into 5 overarching categories as detailed below:

Identity
logo
business card or stationary

Web
web page -uncoded web page design
twitter background

Print
print design – brochures, newsletters, etc…
advertising materials – banners, billboards

Graphics
buttons, icons and avatars
other – design not fitting into any other category

Merchandise
t-shirts or clothing

Additionally, we simplified the design brief fields to make it easier for contest holders to communicate their requirements to the designers.

We have also developed pricing packages to help clarify expectations and guide contest holders when they are choosing a prize amount. The packages levels are grouped as:

• Budget
• Standard
• Premium
• Custom

The pricing of each level varies on the contest type…for example the budget package in a logo contest is set at $195 whereas the the budget package for web page contest is $495. To help the contest holder decide on which package is right for them…we provide guidance as to how many design submissions each package will attract on average. For example, a budget logo package can expect around 40 submissions while a budget web page package can expect around 21 entries. The custom package allows contest holders to enter any prize amount of their choosing so long as it is above our prize minimums.

Which brings us to the final bit of news…we have reached another milestone. We have now awarded over $5 million dollars to our design community, with millions more coming from direct follow on work as a result of the relationships formed at 99designs.

It is our hope that improvements we launched today will help improve user experience and help quickly drive us through the next $5 million.

Cheers,
The 99designs Team

twitter Background for Veronica Belmont

Hey designers to help get our new twitter background category off the ground, Veronica Belmont co-host of Revision3’s Tekzilla, is running a contest for her personal twitter account.

She has over 500,000 followers!

This is a great opportunity to design for one of the most visible accounts on twitter.

So read the brief carefully to find out more about Veronica and then head on over and let your creativity run wild.

Read the brief here.

UPDATE!

Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, has also launched a contest for a custom twitter background.

He has over 225,000 followers on twitter.

Read his brief here.

Good Luck!
The 99designs Team

Further Moneybookers Delays

Well, it looks like after all the trouble we went through to get our “verified merchant account”, we have hit another restriction in our account where we need to verify a bank account. Unfortunately they don’t seem to be sending us the verification deposit, or responding to our support queries. We are doing our best here, but at this point I don’t have any further information about when we will have this resolved other than to tell you that I will be calling them nightly (again).

If we don’t have this resolved in 48 hours we will give you the opportunity to request another payment method.

Thanks for your patience guys. Moneybookers really are the worst payment processing service ever.

New Contest Category Launched: Twitter Background Images

Some of you might have noticed that we launched a new contest category yesterday – 99designs is now accepting design briefs for Twitter background images!

With Twitter now having broken into the mainstream through celebrities such as Oprah and Ashton Kutcher, more and more people are looking to customize their twitter backgrounds so that they stand out from the crowd.

That’s where 99designs comes in. From just $149 (including a contest prize of $100) you’ll get yourself a huge variety of custom designed twitter background images to choose from, all personally tailored to your specific requirements. Want an enhanced bio on the left? Your company logo at the top? Launch your own design contest and let our community of designers know what you need through your brief.

For designers, make sure you check out the contest to design SitePoint’s official twitter background – the winning design will be viewed by SitePoint’s 30,000+ followers, so this is a fantastic opportunity to stake your claim as one of the best!

Make sure you get in quick though, this contest has been fast tracked and only runs for another 2 days…