99designs Review – The Contest Model Puts the Copyright Risk on You

How the Contest Model Actually Works

Stated plainly, because everything else in this review follows from it:

That is not a criticism yet — it is a description. From the buyer’s side it looks excellent: dozens of concepts, from dozens of people, for one fixed price. That is the proposition, and it is genuinely attractive.

The reason to understand the mechanism is that it shapes both the quality and the risk of what you get back — and one of those risks ends up being yours rather than the platform’s.

The Profession’s Own Body Opposes This

Across this review series we have looked for authoritative external positions rather than relying on opinion — a regulator’s finding, a statutory evidence tier, a professional standard. Design has one, and it is unambiguous.

The arithmetic makes it concrete. A designer’s statistical chance of being paid is reported at under 2% in a contest attracting more than 50 entries. Dozens of people can each spend days on a brief that pays exactly one of them.

AIGA’s then-executive director put it as crowdsourcing “taking advantage of designers, asking them to work countless hours without a guarantee of any compensation.” The bodies also argue contests produce weaker results because the formal process gets skipped — concepting, research and sketching are what a designer does before drawing, and none of them survive a race.

We should be fair about the counter-argument. Designers choose to enter, nobody is compelled, and for someone building a portfolio or in a lower-cost economy the expected value may look different than it does to an established studio. A professional body also has an institutional interest in protecting professional rates, and that is worth naming rather than treating AIGA as a neutral referee.

The Part That Is Your Problem, Not Theirs

Here is why we have put an ethics argument in a buying guide, and it is not moralising. The same structure that disadvantages designers creates a legal exposure that lands entirely on the client.

“Caught by the clients themselves” is the phrase to sit with. It means the detection mechanism was a buyer noticing, not the platform screening — which tells you what the screening is worth.

Think about what you do with a logo. You put it on packaging, on a shopfront, on a vehicle, on stationery, on a website. You may apply to register it as a trade mark. Every one of those steps compounds the cost if the design turns out not to be original — and a rebrand after launch is vastly more expensive than the contest was.

This is a buyer-risk finding, not an ethical one, and it is the reason we would tell someone about the labour model even if they had no interest in the fairness question at all.

Why Speed Is the Mechanism

The link between the two findings is worth spelling out, because it explains why this is structural rather than a matter of a few dishonest entrants.

If you are one of fifty entrants with a sub-2% chance of payment, the rational strategy is volume, not depth. Enter many contests. Spend as little time on each as possible. And the fastest routes to a finished-looking concept are:

• Stock art, which may carry licence terms incompatible with a trade mark
• Plagiarised elements lifted from existing work
• Lightly altered existing logos

The Fix Is on the Same Website

This is the constructive part, and it is why this review does not simply say no.

That single change removes both problems at once. There is no unpaid labour, because the person doing the work is being paid for it. And there is no speed incentive, because the designer is not racing forty-nine other people — which removes the pressure that produces the shortcuts behind the originality risk.

You also get the thing contests structurally cannot give you: a relationship. A designer who can ask questions, push back on the brief, and revise properly will produce better work than fifty strangers guessing at what you meant. The professional bodies’ complaint about skipped concepting and research is answered here, not by arguing with it but by restoring the process.

And the Fix Costs You the Guarantee

We were going to end that section with a clean recommendation, and then found the catch.

So the option that is fairer to designers, and lower-risk on originality, is also the option where you carry more of the commercial risk yourself. That is a genuine trade-off rather than a technicality, and we have not seen it laid out anywhere.

Our reading is that the trade is usually worth taking, for a reason worth stating carefully: the guarantee and the risk cover different things. A refund protects you against disliking the designs. It does not protect you against a copyright claim eighteen months after you have printed the packaging — and the second problem is far more expensive than the first.

Mitigate the lost guarantee the ordinary way: look at the designer’s portfolio before hiring, agree scope and revisions in writing, stage payments against milestones if the platform allows, and start with a smaller piece of work before committing to a full identity.

The Guarantee, and Its Three Exceptions

On contests, the guarantee is real and worth crediting — a 100% money-back guarantee if you are not satisfied with the designs your contest receives. For a creative service, where the output cannot be specified in advance, that is a meaningful commitment.

The first exception is the one that will catch people. Selecting finalists feels like an ordinary step in the process, not a decision point — but it closes the refund door. If you are unconvinced by the entries, that is the moment to stop, not the moment to narrow.

What It Costs

The tiering is transparent and the entry price is genuinely low for a business that needs an identity and has no budget for a studio. Add the 5% platform fee to whatever headline figure you are comparing, and note it applies to 1-to-1 work as well as contests.

The tiers buy you designer quality, not more designers, which is the right way round — but it also means the cheapest tier is the one where the volume-over-depth incentive bites hardest.

Who Owns It

Vistaprint acquired 99designs in October 2020, with parent company Cimpress behind the deal. It continues to operate as a separate brand.

That is broadly reassuring on the question of whether the company will still exist next year — a marketplace backed by a large printing group is more durable than a standalone startup, which matters if you need files or support later.

It is also commercially coherent: a printing business buying a design marketplace acquires the step that happens immediately before printing. Worth knowing that the platform sits inside a group with an interest in what you do with the design afterwards.

Contest Versus 1-to-1

Pros and Cons

How We Would Use It

Use the 1-to-1 route for anything you will build a business on. A logo that will go on packaging, signage and a trade mark application is not the place to accept originality risk to save a few hundred dollars, and a rebrand after launch costs many multiples of the contest.

Use a contest when breadth genuinely is the point — when you do not yet know what you want and seeing forty directions would help you find out. That is a real use case, and it is the one thing the model does that hiring one person cannot. Then consider taking the direction you liked to a 1-to-1 designer to build properly.

Whatever you choose, reverse image search the winning design before you use it, and check any stock elements for licence terms compatible with trade mark use. That takes ten minutes and addresses the risk the platform’s own screening evidently does not catch.

And know that selecting finalists ends your refund rights. Decide whether the entries are good enough before you narrow the field, not after.

Limitations of This Review

We have not run a contest or hired a designer through 99designs, and this review says nothing about the quality of work you would actually receive — which is the question most buyers care about most, and which varies by designer, brief and budget rather than by platform.

The plagiarism finding is the one to weigh carefully. It comes from reporting and designer commentary rather than a systematic audit; “rampant with no effective monitoring” is a characterisation we are relaying, not a measurement we have made, and we cannot tell you what proportion of submissions are affected. The platform states it does not allow unoriginal work, and it is entirely possible that most contests produce entirely original results. Our argument is about the direction of the incentive, which we think holds regardless of the frequency.

AIGA is a professional body with an institutional interest in professional rates, which we have said in the text and repeat here — its position is authoritative about the profession’s view rather than neutral. The under-2% figure is a reported statistic we could not verify independently. Pricing, fees and guarantee terms are as reportedrather than read from the platform’s own documents, and they change — verify before paying, particularly the finalist-selection exception and the exclusion of 1-to-1 from the guarantee, on which much of this review turns. We did not read a Trustpilot score and publish no satisfaction rating. Nothing here is legal advice, and anything touching trade marks belongs with a lawyer.

Frequently Asked Questions

Verdict

The contest model in one sentence: many designers submit, one is paid, everyone else works for nothing — a reported sub-2% chance of payment in a 50-entry contest. AIGA takes a strong stance against speculative work and, with the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada, argues crowdsourcing harms the industry, going as far as an open letter to the Tokyo Olympic Committee. That is the profession’s own institution, though it is fair to note a professional body is not a neutral referee on professional rates.

But we would tell you about the labour model even if you did not care about fairness, because the same structure creates a risk that is yours. The contest rewards speed, and the fast routes to a finished-looking concept are stock art, plagiarised elements and lightly altered existing logos. Reporting describes plagiarised work as rampant despite a stated ban, with several stolen designs caught by clients themselves — which tells you what the screening is worth. If you trademark something that is not original, that is your legal problem, and a rebrand after launch costs many multiples of the contest.

The fix is on the same website. 1-to-1 projects pay the designer for the work, which removes the unpaid labour and the speed incentive together, and restores the briefing and revision that a contest structurally cannot provide.

And then the catch we did not expect: the 100% money-back guarantee does not cover 1-to-1 invoicing. The fairer, safer option is the one where you carry more commercial risk. We would still take it, because the guarantee and the risk cover different things — a refund protects you against disliking the designs, not against a copyright claim eighteen months after you printed the packaging.

Credit where due: a 100% money-back guarantee on a creative service is rare and real, pricing is transparent and low enough for a business with no studio budget, and Vistaprint ownership means it will likely still be there when you need the files. Just note that selecting finalists closes the refund door, and that guaranteed contests are excluded from it entirely.

Run a contest if you genuinely need breadth to work out what you want. Then hire someone 1-to-1 to build it properly — and reverse image search whatever you end up with.