As a developer I have used 99designs and was able to find something acceptable. I have however worked with designers of real and rare skill, and they do work that inspires and changes the direction of my development. That's stuff if I could do I would not do for 200 bucks.

That's kind of the issue - before 99 designs I had to have no design or use my own abilities to get there. It was awful. Now 99designs has raised the awful to acceptable for merely 200 bucks. From my point of view that's great - but it seems there were a lot of people paying designers when they just wanted a logo and a theme

I should say that bootstrap and wordpress has done as much to take this source of incone away as 99deigns. There is now an automated bottom to the market. So it's harder now to find clients. Good designers need to show value add, like the rest of us. I would suggest they a lid the idea of a single site rewrite and join up with AB testers and offer site improvement services in a monthly payment cycle.

The top of the market through is still game change time

Bootstrap is a great example of something that might have taken _some_ work away from _some_ designers, but the whole it contributes back to is much richer as a result.

Since Bootstrap and other high-quality frameworks have been released I've noticed an all-around higher baseline quality of design (which is a good thing - I'm well aware that there's not always the time or money to involve a designer), and more importantly they provide a nice _baseline_ for developers to get more interested in honing their own design skills.

A parallel might be…say…Rails? I could never have dreamt of making my own web apps in Ruby without it - as a beginner things would have just been far too intimidating. Too many things to learn. But Rails quickly got me to a base level of competency from which I could add skills, and go back to basics (and write things in vanilla Ruby etc). A bit of hand-holding is great.

But yeah - as a craftsman who respects others I try to always employ highly-paid local engineers. That's kind of why we don't (always) like 99designs (but that's a different discussion for a different day I think)

I don't really know the designer market, but I was not arguing that bootstrap was overall a bad thing, but I get the impression that you don't need a designer to get a basic site off the ground, much like php or rails means you don't need a developer to get off the ground.

I would suggest we are eliminating the basement level of incompetant design or development, at the cost of not having any basement level clients. This is again probably a good thing.

And yes discussion is going off on a tangent. Stopping now :-)

Edit : thinking it through I would say that the 99designs logo was actually unsatisfactory. It was not technically so (vector graphics, nice clean lines, looks vaguely cloud)

What it was not was anything to do with my business my values my goals or the clients I want to communicate with.

As such it was unsatisfactory - and I guess that's the pain point a good designer needs to beat. Just as I as a custom software developer needs to solve a clients actual problems to be more value than an off shelf product, same for designers.

Just wanted to point out the 99designs et al are not what I think a "designer" does.

ok now really stopping

Bootstrap only takes away the most basic work. This is a relieve for anyone who knows enough about design to be called a designer.

The only "designers" really loosing work are people eho read 1 book about html and css and want to earn some "fast and easy" money as "designers".

that gels with my edit above - good designers get the underlying values of the project.

Uses a lot of Shutterstock (vector)art for logo's. This is outlawed by Shutterstock and can get your company in serious trouble. (As well as not being very origional. You can't claim copyright on piece of shutterstock art).

Long story short, the argument for 99designs is that people who wouldn't want to pay for real designers get what they want/deserve. The argument against it is that it belittles the industry and the designers themselves because people come to expect that that's all they should have to pay for this type of work. Additionally, having so many people clamoring at the chance to work on such cheap projects makes it seem as though this is a popular/acceptable/financially secure way to make money in this industry when it isn't. To go into detail..

Some people are always going to be at a skill level where 99designs is really the only chance they have to get paid for their work. These are people that despite all of their years, just don't have the eye or the execution to improve. At the same time, they're going to feel as if over these years, they'll have accumulated enough work and had enough experience to charge more for the same, crappy stuff, so you'll see people charging higher rates for subpar work simply based on the fact that they were able to get away with getting paid for crap to begin with. These same people, despite their work, will have attained high reputations and have more projects under their belt, which makes them look better on-paper than someone who is actually a better designer. Worse, there's a lot of folks like these who take someone else's initial submitted concept and run with that instead of iterating on an original idea. This gives them more time to work on the details of someone else's submission, thus looking more fleshed-out and more likely to be chosen.

For others, it is a jumping-off point, where they contribute to help get a feel for real-life projects, client interaction, and just to hone their skills. These are often teenagers, college students or people making a career switch. The difference between these and the above is that they do get better, but they might feel as if they're going to upset past clients if they begin charging what they're worth.

Additionally, there's no 99designs for a higher caliber of designers. There used to be a service called Arteis (a private subsidiary of Logoworks) that worked in a similar way to 99designs (crowdsource-to-one-on-one), but they would kick designers who they felt weren't quality enough, ignored the site or were rated poorly by multiple clients. A couple years ago, they closed the Arteis service down and made it so that you were either working internally for Logoworks or you were one of their on-call freelancers. I had friends that were making upwards of $30-50k a year off of this service who went from having a seemingly endless array of projects they could work on at their feet to having to hustle to get work at all (especially at the rates they were charging through Arteis, because being vetted by a company like that made clients feel more confident in the money they were spending).

This is the same problem 99designers often find themselves in, too.

And to your point about being happy with the results, I think that's subjective; if you're not a designer yourself, it's difficult to foresee the application of the logo working everywhere it will need to. Most 99designs logos are noticeably so, and honestly when I come across them in the wild, the company/project probably would have been better-served with just plaintext until they could afford a professional.

takes away many designers source of income

Not really. I could not make a living of working on logo's for 99 bucks. I enjoy creating brands and than creating a logo that fit's the brand. A logo is not a brand.

How so? It's a marketplace for designers. I could accept the argument that it depresses prices, but not this. And it's not just logos for $99 either.