99designs blog - Leading Designer Marketplace for Logo Design and more…

Update: The voting deadline has been extended to the 4th of July.

The time has come to vote for the winning entry for the Win a MacBook competition. We are thrilled with the response, nearly 800 entries are in the running! We have put together a page for you guys to vote on your favorites. Voting will be open for 7 days, after which the design with the most votes will be the winner!

You can only vote if you signed up before June 20th. We will be discounting votes from duplicate accounts (yes, we are well aware of these).

Click here to Vote Now!

There was an issue with one of our servers which is causing problems when creating contests. This should not have effected other aspects of the site. We have the problem fixed and are investigating the cause. Thanks for your patience guys.

P.S. First time we have had a bug report via YouTube, the internet is a beautiful thing.

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.

The new site is alive! Some things to look out for:

• Conversation between Contest Holders and Designers is now per-designer, not per entry.
• My Shortlist has been replaced by My Watchlist, under My Contests in My Account
• My Contests now lives under My Account
• Improved documentation and help
• Neat looking designer/contest pages
• Recent events under My Account
• Improved search
• AJAX goodness

The new site is running off new different technical infrastructure too, which will ironically result in things being much faster once everything has warmed up. In the meantime, bear with a little bit of slowness, things will level out within the hour.

Let us know what you think!

P.S. If you need a contest extension due to the downtime, please contact support via contact@99designs.com and include your username and contest url.

We are launching the new site within the next 24 hours, don’t be alarmed if you log in and the site looks brighter than it used to

Update #1: The site will be down for approx. 1 hour, from 12pm melbourne time.

Update #2: The migration was pushed back a little - we’ll be back on the air by 3pm Melbourne time.

The first stage of 99designs has been launched! This stage is just the first step of re-branding our site, you will notice that the user pages (like your profile and account management) are new, along with the credit purchase process. The really cool stuff happens over the next month or so as we build the new design.

A few things to note:

• You can login with either your old forum username or your email address.
• More detailed public profiles, last login date, country, etc
• You can view a detailed history of credit purchases, including how you have spent credits and credits awaiting fulfillment via the “account” tab in the top right of your screen, and then the “credit history” button on the left.
• You can update your profile, including bio, avatars etc via the account screen.
• Private messages are sent via email for the moment, expect this to change soon!

Finally, welcome and thanks to our first customer as 99designs, maximus who launched a contest for a logo.

Credit for the photo goes to Nonie.

Well, we are just hours away from our first step towards becoming 99designs. The first step isn’t quite as glamorous as the screenshots you have no doubt seen of the upcoming design, but it’s an important step because it represents separation from SitePoint, and the first step towards bringing you all of the features we have been talking about.

What you can expect in this first phase is the Design Contests site you are used to, but with 99designs branding. In addition to this you will notice that the user accounts system is entirely revamped, as is the credit purchase process. We have transferred all existing Design Contests accounts over to the new system, along with your credit balance. You can login either with your email address or with your old SitePoint Forums username.

This temporary site will be used whilst we develop the new look and feel, which is where the fun begins! Please bear with us during this transitional phase, Paul, myself and Nonie (our new support team) will be doing our very best to make this launch smooth and painless.

The site will be down for maintenance from 10:00am - 11:30am on Wed Feb 13th, Melbourne Time.

*update* check out our design contest for the logo!

You might have noticed that things have been a little quiet recently on the feature front. The reality, behind the scenes, is we have been furiously at work making some major changes to our business.

As Design Contests has grown, a problem with a percentage of contest holders abandoning contests or not paying designers has arisen. This has been deeply concerning us for sometime now, as I know it has been concerning our designers. The logical answer to this problem is to start taking some or all of the prize money up front from contest holders - in other words reducing the risk for designers. This combined with some changes to the way we run design contests, seemed like it would make things a lot better.

With that decision made, we sat down to figure out the best way to do things properly from a business perspective as well (as you can imagine the business model that we’re describing has many different ramifications associated with it). At the same time we realized that the “future” design contests was a very different business to SitePoint, and in order for it to reach its full potential we really needed to set it free from sitepoint.com and brand it differently. It very quickly became clear to us that the best way to achieve everything we wanted to with Design Contests was to separate it from SitePoint and setup a new company focused only on Design Contests, so 99designs was born.

Paul, myself and Mark Harbottle (one of the founders of SitePoint) have signed on as the full-time team for the new company, 99designs, which represents a massive leap for us. We believe that we can build something incredible for you guys and we’re totally excited about it - so much so that we quit our day jobs at SitePoint to do it!

So, what does this mean for you? Well, the steps between here and there are:

1. A release of Design Contests with minimal re-branding, completely separate from the forums and sitepoint.com
2. A logo contest and design refresh for the site - 99designs.com
3. A reputation system, credit collection up front and some changes to how we run contests

Things should speed up from this point, as we have spent the past 6 weeks just working on step 1, which was quite an undertaking.

I will leave you with some of the design concepts we have been working on, look out for a design contest for our new logo soon!