4 Nerdy Companies That Have Used 99designs

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99designs is an on-demand marketplace where companies can run a design contest to find their dream business card design, website, stationary, social media assets, and so on. In this article we’ll take a look at some of the nerdiest companies that have used 99designs to find their logo!

How Does the Process Work?

Companies start by creating a design brief for the logo, outlining details of their customer demographic, the logo’s requirements, and a list of things to not do with the design. They pay a fee to receive an unlimited amount of submissions (the higher the fee, the higher the prize, and that will result in more high-quality designers entering the contest).

But how do companies increase their chances of finding their dream logo? By creating the best brief of course! Designs that win, win because the designer listened carefully to the brief.

Lets take a look at some examples!

StackOverflow

StackOverflow is a Q&A community where developers can seek help with programming-related issues, although Jeff and Joel wanted something that was meaningful to both programmers and non-programmers. It had to be clean, simple, memorable, read the word “stackoverflow”, and use an icon of some kind. It’s safe to say that most of the runners-up chose a “memory overflowing a call stack” concept, which developers would clearly understand, but also beginner programmers would grasp the basic concept of.

Which is kind of fitting for a Q&A website where there are beginners and experts alike — it was simply a matter of choosing the one design that exhales “awesomeness” (as Jeff requested!).

Have a look at the winning design by Please_Remove, and the runners-up. Jeff and Joel didn’t specify any color requirements, but the top three runners-up all used orange colors — you can tell entrants which designs you like the most, to give future entrants some insight into what you’re looking for, so that likely resulted in an influx of orange designs afterwards.

Flippa

Flippa is the largest marketplace for buying and selling websites, domains and apps. Flippa needed to come across as serious and trustworthy if it was to attract entrepreneurs, internet marketers and website investors, and they had decided that the logo needed to look appealing on a light blue (#dbe5ee) background, as well as a black and white background.

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by Daniel Schwarz via SitePoint