Graphic Design on a budget

   Wow, it has been a while since I have written a blog post, but I wanted to share a quick note for those who are organizing events and may need graphics design work at a reasonable price.  In the past, the graphics for all the Devlink Technical Conference materials were designed by either myself or John Baker.  This year neither of us had much time to work on the t-shirt graphic for DEVLINK 2012 so what to do.  Well, recently I was introduced to a website called 99designs.com where you create a contest for designers to compete against one another to create you custom artwork.  I knew of someone else who had used the site to have a logo created for their company with great results.  Since the site offers a money back guarantee, everything is handled via PayPal, I figured it wouldn't hurt to setup a contest to see what kind of designs I could get.  I could always burn the midnight oil if the attempt was unsuccessful.
     So the way this site works, you can offer as much as you want for a winning design, but the starting price was $149, which is pretty cheap for a graphic artist to create a custom design.  The process was pretty straightforward:

• Create some specifics about the desired design
• Let them know what you don't want to see
• Share any logo's that you might want incorporated
• Setup the length of time the contest will run.
• Start the contest and enjoy

I like the length of the contest because they do it in a few stages.  First, you have the open period which is several days, depending on your selection.  Once you get a flood of designs you can converse with the designers to request changes, rates designs and even create a poll so you can get others input.  When you are ready, you can pick finalists from the group and then you repeat the process of communication until you have the winner.  Once you select the winner they upload the files and transfer all ownership of the design to you and they get the money.

In the end, the design selected wasn't what I originally was thinking yet it fits great with the conference.  Below you can see the final graphic.  This design will decorate the back of every DEVLINK 2012 conference shirt and water bottles.  So if you are looking for some graphics work and don't have a huge budget, the 99designs.com website might be worth your time.

DEVLINK 2012 Conference Graphic