Understanding 99designs' Quality Standards
99designs is a place for designers to learn and grow, but we are also a professional marketplace that expects professional design work.
What are 99designs' quality standards?
To ensure clients receive professional designs and maintain the trust of our design community, we curate designers based on our minimum quality standards. Design is inherently subjective but there are certain industry standards that client rely on us to enforce.
We are constantly reviewing designer profiles to ensure they meet our quality standards, and we reserve the right to put designers’ accounts on hold if they do not meet them.
Each designer portfolio is judged by the level of professionalism and skills across all of the following quality standards:
- Execution of Design Principles: How well you execute typography, visual hierarchy, composition and color in your designs. This includes presenting a complete and professional profile of only your best work.
- Conceptual Thought: How well you develop creative concepts that effectively solve a client’s business needs, avoid generic design, avoid copying other designers, and follow our stock policy.
- Technical Skills and Deliverables: How well you organize and produce industry standard files and deliverables to clients.
- Client Communication and Satisfaction: How professionally you communicate to clients, keep a positive responsiveness score, successfully complete handovers and projects, gain positive client reviews, grow your repeat clients, and comply with our Designer Code of Conduct.
Designers must demonstrate proficiency in all the criteria above, not just one or two of them.
Essential resources
Boost your skills with these resources about the criteria for our quality standards.
1. How to execute basic design principles
Learn more >>
2. Design mistakes to avoid
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3. Generic design: What is it and what does it look like?
4. How to avoid generic designs
