The website has 120,000 designers from 192 countries and pays designers more than $1.2 million every month. The 99designs.ca ready-made logo store has more than 13,000 high-quality logos available for customization and sale right off the shelf from $99. Or, the project can be crowdsourced to a large group of designers through an open call. A typical design contest receives an average of 90 custom design concepts.
There’s a 100 per cent money back guarantee should you not find the perfect design, and customers receive full ownership rights to the design they purchase.
“As a Canadian, it’s an honour to launch 99designs.ca and help small businesses across the country achieve unprecedented value for their design dollar,” says Matt Mickiewicz, co-founder, 99designs.ca. “Our site dramatically cuts design costs from thousands to hundreds of dollars.”
The website supports graphic designers with finding customers, invoicing and workflow management. With no cost to join, designers can instantly connect with thousands of businesses in need of custom design work and can then select the projects that best suit their specific talents.
Here are some examples of great and not-so-great logos from www.99designs.ca.
1. Reproduces well against different backgrounds: This versatile logo would look great on glassware, a coloured T-shirt, a black trade show curtain and a white business card.
2. Scalable: You can shrink this creative image down to look good on a business card and product label or blow it up to poster size.
3. Easy to read: This font is simple and interesting. It’s easy to distinguish between two letters and no one will confuse the “i” and “l”.
What to avoid:
4. Overly complicated designs: This logo’s many effects including gradients, shadows and embossing make it look busy and blurry.
5. Bright neon and light colours: The colours in this logo are jarring. Additionally, the image and lettering will disappear when it’s shrunk to a smaller size.
6. Too many fonts: It’s hard to know what to read first on a busy logo like this.
