Note: Sharing my answer to a question posted in Quora.

My background: I’ve participated in several crowdsourcing platforms for design (like 99designs) in its early stages as a designer, then went on and co-founded a design studio as well as a curated crowdsourcing platform for logo design.

From my experience, it totally depends on platform you’re using, the budget & time you have and the design options you want to see. If you have the budget, established design studios are the way to go. But don’t write off crowdsourcing platforms as they too can provide great value for money, especially for startups and SME’s.

I was doing my graduation in Computer Science when I first started working as a designer at famous early crowdsourcing platforms like 99designs. With a lot of passion for design, my friend and I started working day and night with clients on similar platforms, and we continued it for around 4 years. We learned quite a lot and obviously made a lot of money. But most importantly, we worked together with a lot of good clients and challenging projects.

With the experience we had gained working on such platforms, I managed to start my own dream design studio, WowMakers. It’s 2 years old now and doing very well. In a short span of time, we managed to work with 150+ startups/SMEs and even got a chance to work with behemoths like Microsoft and Blackberry.

During this time, we’ve been approached by a lot of quality startups and SMEs to work for them. But as a startup ourselves, with a small team — we were not able to take up all the work either because they don’t have enough funding or because our hands were full.

There is still a great demand for designs and supply for quality design is very low. Not everyone can afford premium rates, but they should not be cheated with cheap quality works.

This is indeed a problem to solve.

And so we decided to solve this. On August 1, 2013 — we launched CrowdStudio, a curated platform for crowdsourcing logo design.

The word ‘curated’ is very important here. Not everyone can join the platform as a designer. Our team checks every designer’s portfolio before adding them to the platform.

We, ourselves, have run a Logo design project for CrowdStudio for Rs. 25,000 (around $400) and got an awesome logo.

Will I recommend crowdsourcing for graphic design?

So in my experience, if you ask me, I would say it depends on the following factors:

Budget: If you have lot of money to spend on graphic design, please don’t crowdsource. Find a great design studio who have a very good communication skills, portfolio, values, list of good clients and prefer to work with them.

This is always the best, no matter what the other options are.

360 degree Branding: Not all businesses need top to bottom branding. There are many Mom & Pop stores that may choose to stay small and don’t think of growing too much. For them, a logo to go in their business card or brochure is all they need. They don’t want to spend $10,000 for it. If they really need 360 degree branding, they should have the budget in the first place.

Quality: Clients always want quality design. If the crowdsourcing platform can give them quality design, I will recommend using it for sure. And that’s exactly what we are trying to do with CrowdStudio.

Time and design choices: Once we have dealt with the money factor, the most important thing that troubles a lot of startups, small and medium enterprises is the turn around time and design options they get. Crowdsourcing platforms solve this as most design projects get finished within a week and provide a lot of design options.

Bottomline

Crowdsourcing platforms still work because of two facts:

• Not everyone has deep pockets.
• Not all businesses need 360 degree branding.

What do you think? Will you recommend crowdsourcing for graphic design?