Design contest site 99designs has launched a new site/brand in beta for hiring designers to help out with simple fixes. Swiftly charges a flat $15 for the service, which draws from the 99designs community.
The idea behind the new service is that small businesses without in-house designers will now have a convenient 24/7 option when in need of a minor tweak to a logo or graphic. The model is reminiscent of the Casting Words transcription service, which taps Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to source transcribers.
99designs expects jobs to be completed within a couple hours, and the average turnaround for tasks during its testing phase was 20 minutes. When I filed a sample request to change the TNW logo from orange to purple, a designer submitted the completed work in less than 30 minutes.
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With the new site, 99designs is branching out into a different area of the design industry. One key difference between the two sites is that Swiftly draws from a select group of designers, while 99designs contests crowdsource from its community.
Swiftly’s aggressive pricing makes it well worth it for non-designers to outsource tasks instead of spending hours fiddling on their own. It should also be a huge boon for lean startups that lack in-house designers. The service is in beta now, but I expect it to take off…well, swiftly.
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