99designs Challenges Its Design Community: Make Us a New Homepage!

San Francisco/Melbourne/London
22 Apr 2012

99designs the largest online marketplace for crowdsourced graphic design services, is challenging its own community of more than 150,000 graphic designers to revamp its homepage. The 99designs Homepage Redesign Contest kicks off today and will accept entries through May 14.

Submissions will be judged by 99designs staff and a panel of industry experts including Joe Gebbia, co-founder and CPO of Airbnb; Arem Duplessis, Design Director for The New York Times Magazines; Eric Ries, author of the bestselling book “The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses” and the blog “Startup Lessons Learned”; and Mark Harbottle, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded 99designs, Flippa and SitePoint, among other companies, and has played an instrumental role in shaping the products at all of them. (Additional information about the judges can be found here.)

99designs will choose up to three winning homepage designs, and will award a $1,000 cash prize to each winning designer. Following the contest, 99designs will test the homepage designs using its internal testing methodologies, and will incorporate winning elements into the next version of its homepage.

“We’ve always believed in ‘eating our own dog food,’ starting with the 99designs logo design contest we held in our early days,” said 99designs CEO Patrick Llewellyn. “No one knows us better than the thousands of graphic designers who spend hours every day interacting with customers in our marketplace, and we can’t wait to see what they come up with for 99designs.”

Designers who wish to participate in the 99designs Homepage Redesign Contest can register for free and review contest details on the contest page.

About 99designs
99designs, the largest online marketplace for crowdsourced graphic design services, enables businesses to source custom logo design, web design, t-shirt design, print design and other graphic design work quickly and affordably by launching design contests to a global community of more than 150,000 designers in 192 countries. In addition to its design contests, 99designs provides a 1-to-1 invoicing system that enables designers and customers to work together efficiently, and offers a ready-made logo store stocked with more than 20,000 high-quality logos available for customization and sale right off the shelf. The company was co-founded by serial entrepreneurs Mark Harbottle and Matt Mickiewicz (SitePoint, Flippa), and is backed by Accel Partners and angel investors Michael Dearing (eBay, Harrison Metal), Dave Goldberg (Survey Monkey), Stewart Butterfield (Flickr, Tiny Speck) and Anthony Casalena (Squarespace). To learn more about 99designs, including where the company is hiring, visit www.99designs.com.

Media contact (Worldwide):
Lauren Gard
510-246-1366
lauren.gard@99designs.com

Media contact (Australia):
Caroline Shawyer
+61 (0) 401 496 334
caroline@prgroup.com.au