'Net Features : 99designs

Squash Bugs with GitHub Survivor

Allison Howen — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 19:30:00 GMT

Developers have a lot on their minds, which makes it easy for them to occasionally forget about bugs.

Development teams, however, can prevent bugs from becoming an issue with GitHub Survivor, which is essentially a dashboard that displays an overview of bugs in a GitHub-hosted repo.

The development team at 99designs, for example, implemented the dashboard as a way to better monitor bugs.

“We’ve found it helps keep our minds on bugs,” a blogpost from 99designs states. “It reminds us to make a small effort every sprint, gradually bringing the bug count closer to zero.”

It is important to note that the dashboard has a gamification element to it, because it features a bug leaderboard that shows which developers have closed the most bugs and which have closed the least. Additionally, the dashboard displays the current open bug count, the net difference in open bugs since the last reporting period, and charts for the number of bugs opened and closed in the last 12 reporting periods, as well as the number of open bugs in the same time frame.

99Designs Disrupts the Design Service Business

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 01:30:00 GMT

Design contest platform 99designs is not exactly the darling of the Web design world. Many believe that the company actually does more harm than good to designers and to the design industry itself.

Whether you love it or hate it, you can’t argue with the cold hard facts – 99Designs is growing and as it stands now, shows no signs of slowing down.

The four-year-old company, which received $35 million funding in April 2011, has held more than 115,000 design contests on its site to date, has doubled the run rate of new contests from a year ago and is on track to surpass 200,000 design contests by the end of 2012. That’s serious. It’s disruptive . . . and awesome.

The payouts that 99designs distributes to designers is also increasing. The design service expects to pay out approximately $1.5 million to its design community for contests held in January 2012, twice what designers earned for contests last January. 99designs has paid out over $29 million to date and projects it will pay out $25 million to its designer community in 2012.

Top designers on 99designs, according to the company, have reported earning more than $10,000 per month from a combination of designer payouts earned and ongoing client work sourced through the marketplace.

“2011 was a stand-out year for 99designs, from rapid growth in design contests and payouts to the successful launch of the first localized versions of our site in Australia and Canada,” said CEO Patrick Llewellyn. “In 2012 we’re focused on continuous improvement of our services as crowdsourced graphic design enters the mainstream. Caroline and Jeff not only have the experience we need at this next stage of growth, they are also passionate about design, which makes them a great fit for our team and community.”

Gap Logo Fail Sparks 99Designs Contest

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 03:00:00 GMT

99designs launched an open design contest to “Design a Better GAP Logo” in response to the criticism designers and GAP customers around the world expressed when the GAP recently unveiled its own logo redesign. The project was open for anyone to participate and received 4,660 submissions from over 1,000 designers in just 5 days.

The submissions can be viewed here; the winning design will be decided by community vote and presented to GAP management in a gesture of goodwill.

“The GAP logo is so iconic and the redesign has clearly stirred up song strong opinions,” said Mark Harbottle, founder of 99designs.com. “We thought this would be a fun and constructive way to give people the opportunity to express themselves - we’re excited by incredible response and amazing talent of our design community!”