Opportunity:
It is often not cost effective for organizations to have their own in-house designers, especially smaller or startup organizations. When that is the case, the companies need to contract their design work to other organizations, which can be costly and may not result in satisfactory work. A bad experience with a specific web designer leads to another search and trial with another partner wasting time and resources. Design Hill helps organizations looking for a credible marketplace to source design and creative work for a cost-effective fee. It also allows creative artists to find work and earn income through their submissions.
Solution:
Designhill allows companies to post competitions to source new designs. This is particularly popular with small businesses and startups as these organizations look for a cost effective way to create designs for their company. Artists on the platform will submit pieces of work that meet the requirements and specifications of companies that host design competitions on the platform. The contracting company is also entitled to full ownership and complete copyrights to the winning design.
On the artists’ side of the platform, Designhill allows individuals to gain experience and exposure for their work. It also provides an opportunity to experiment and potentially win contests that pay an income. Additionally, it gives artists a centralized place to see available income opportunities.
The platform doesn’t just provide logos, it has over 40+ different design categories ranging from business cards to leaflets and websites. This allows the platform to meet a multitude of company needs and allows a variety of different types of artists to be on the platform.
Effectiveness, Commercial Promise, and Competition:
Designhill’s platform has proven itself an effective platform for graphic design services. Over 50,000 businesses have successfully sourced high quality logos within one month of its launch [2]. Additionally, the company generated $100,000 within six months of opening its services to businesses and breaks even at unit level on every transaction that takes place on the platform. [4]
Assuming it maintains its current momentum, they are likely to gain enough traction to overcome challenges related to network effects. The platform does an effective job of retaining users through its point incentive program. In addition to monetary compensation, artists accrue points that can be exchanged for additional benefits. With its current rate of success, the company is hopeful to carve out its share of the $54 billion graphic design industry [4].
However, there are some challenges associated with using this particular crowdsourced approach to design-related work. Some designers work better after becoming very familiar with an organization, its culture and its priorities. So, this type of logo design may work better for smaller organizations that do not have larger overarching marketing programs (and associated budgets) yet.
Competition
Designhill is not the first company to offer crowdsourced logo design services. Companies like Fiverr offer similar services, although none are able to intelligently pair requests with designers to manage the workload.
99designs.com is a website that provides logo design and packaging design services. Others include Crowdspring.com, DesignCrowd.com, Fiverr.com. Designhill’s starting price point is $199, which is relatively low-cost compared with other companies offering similar services. For example, Crowdspring and 99designs start at $299 each. Designhill received the Rising Star award and Great User Experience Award by Finances Online in 2017.
Suggestions / Improvements:
- Improve website to align with brand and demonstrate competency in design
- Develop minimum quality guidelines to uphold status of brand
- Collect data on adoption and implementation of logos designed on DesignHill to report out on metrics and build consumer base
- Rather than offering services in 35+ design categories, consider deepening expertise in several priority categories
Sources:
[1] https://www.designhill.com/
[3] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/designhill-com
[5] https://www.groundreport.com/designhill-review-crowdsourcing-actually-worth-time-money/
[6] Video describing Designhill business: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-abeznXL-E
[8] https://articles.bplans.com/top-4-crowdsourced-logo-design-sites-for-small-businesses/
Team Members:
Pavlina Plasilova, Kelly de Klerk, Yuxiao Zhang, Aziz Munir, Megan McDonald
Platform Dashboard:
Example competition posting:
Example Winning Design Work:
