Today I discovered 99designs.com, a website that lets you run design contests: you set up a contest, and the relative prize, and then wait for designs to come. After one week, you decide which one is good, and pay it. Cool.
Design contests are often an exploitation of designers’ time, but in this case it seems that rates are fair, and clients are cool.
They offer, for example, guaranteed prize contests, in which clients pay in advance, and then the winner gets the cash directly from 99designs. In this way, clients can’t just exploit good ideas and then manufacture them at lower costs with their own designer.
