99Designs: A Fun Way to Get Your Stuff Designed

August 26, 2011

I tried 99Designs for the first time this week, and it’s going straight onto my hack list of awesome digital tools.

If you haven’t heard of 99Designs, it’s a site where you can launch a contest to design whatever you need — a website, banner for your site, logo, book cover, etc. You explain what you’re looking for, and designers create it. Lots of designers, so you have heaps of choices that are far more creative than what you could’ve come up with yourself. In the end, you choose a winner. You pay the site, and the site turns most of that money over to the winner of the contest.

Fun, right? Other sites offer this too, like CrowdSpring.

I’ve been dying to try it, and I need a design for a new online course I’m preparing to launch. So I figured this was the perfect opportunity!

The course is about how to use social media to Make Your Own Luck, a topic I write about a lot on this blog. I’ll tell you more as it gets closer to launch, but you’ll be able to sign up to get an email tip each day that will help you use social media strategically to build your network and make connections, with the goal of helping opportunities find you. A unique idea that deserves a unique design!

I paid $149 to launch the contest. That’s more than I’d normally pay for a button like this, but I wanted to 1. try out the system 2. get some ideas because I had no idea what I wanted the button to look like and 3. maybe discover a designer who could make buttons for me going forward.

So designers started creating the buttons, and as entries came in, I rated them, giving feedback to the designer about what I liked and didn’t like. This, in my mind, is the coolest part of the site, because after I gave feedback, the designer would come back with a tweaked button that hopefully was more in line with my tastes.

Can you see how awesome this would be if you wanted to create a cover for your self-published book or a new design for your blog or any other digital projects that need to look pretty?

Now I’m at the point where there are three designs I really like, and I need to choose one. 99Designs offers yet another cool feature, whereby I can let my friends vote!

Which button do you like?

Use Social Media to Make Your Own Luck

 

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