10 Graphic Designer Resources to Find Online Work

As a professional designer you want to fatten up your portfolio and reach new clients. As a designer hobbyist, you wish to improve your skills, possibly put your works-of-art on display and even turn your hobby into a profitable business. If you’ve identified yourself in any of these sentences, you’ve come to the right place.

Below are 10 great sites offering designers a chance to submit creative suggestions and entries to thousands of places in logo design, web design, print design, banner design, and many more. Now, the best part is that if your work gets selected, you will not only take home the honor of winning a contest, but also a cash prize.

Interested? Here’s a list of 10 great resources for Graphic Designers that could assist in a quick ‘career and pocket’ boost.

99 designs is a crowdsourcing marketplace that allows freelance graphic designers to submit their work to design contests held by firms, companies and small businesses from across the globe. 99designs simply hosts these projects in return for a small fee from the project poster. There’s absolutely no fee involved in submitting your design, and you can even submit more entries if you want to.

We wanted to provide you with an ultimate resource of design gigs than what you can find elsewhere, hence we’ve included Donanza’s work-from-home project search engine in this list. Using Donanza’s search engine, you’d find contests in design at your fingertips when you perform a search. Not only will the search bring up all the designs contests available in the web, but it will also include details about each (site info and project details). Finally, you can also perform searches for different work-from-home projects that you may want to do– writing, programming, virtual assisting- you name it!

Own a page of your own? Donanza also gives you the opportunity to expose fellow designers to contests in your field while making money with Donanza’s project board.

As they chose to label themselves, crowdSPRING is a marketplace for creative services. ‘Creative’ projects posted in crowdSPRING are (but are not limited to) business card, logo and website design. crowdSPRING works pretty much similar to 99 designs, only it is far better on ensuring secure, safe and fair online transactions between their buyers and sellers. A customized legal contract and free copyright protection guarantees sellers that their works-of-art won’t go off their hands unpaid. In addition, project management not only involves buyer posting the project details, but also placing funds on escrow for the winning seller.

Sometimes, experience often equates to credibility, and if it is credibility that you are on a look out for, you may opt to try Graphic Competitions. Graphic Competitions is the first worldwide art contest directory online. Born in 1998, Graphic Competitions proved to be a reliable source of design gigs from designers from around the globe, for which it may account its ‘staying power’. Graphic designers are known to be born art lovers, and if you are one; we assure you that you won’t get disappointed with the projects that you can find in this site.

Here’s a graphic design contest site that focuses solely on logo design. Logo Tournament is a site that allows project posters to start a logo design contest at a pot money prize that starts at $250. The process of project management is fairly simple. Project posters fill out logo design contest forms gathering information from them about the design project. Through this same form, they get to define for how long are they willing to wait for their ‘ideal logo’ to show up, and how much are they willing to pay for it.  Buyers don’t pay for a project post fee, but sellers would have to share 15% of the total prize money to Logo Tournament as the site’s commission. If you are into logo designing, and you feel that $250 is good enough for you as a starting price for a hobby or for your blossoming career in design, then try them out. Registration is absolutely free.

Genius rocket is a community of creative minds who would want to earn cash on the side while pursuing a passion.  Genius Rocket offers a variety of creative services, one of which is graphic design. They refer to the projects posted in the community as requests. As clients post requests with clearly defined requirements like the project’s scope and budget, Genius Rocket sends out an RFB (Request For Brilliance) to members of the community who would in turn respond with submissions. Talk about creativity, and the language used within the site would speak for itself.

Rates are a lot better as compared to other creative contest sites so be prepared to sweat your way through competing with real creative minds.  Genius Rocket’s 20% fee is in recommendation is a charge to the buyer.

Check Genius Rocket out and find projects on logos and business card design, print ad layout, brochure design, magazine and book layout, websites and banner ads, and icon and button designs.

DesignCrowd works two ways— it is a graphic design contest site and bidding site in one. Sounds helpful? Definitely!

DesignCrowd is commendable in two ways, too. First, because of its business model that allows graphic design creatives to either bid on projects or submit entries to design contests in order to test their skills and challenge themselves.  Second, because it is the only contest site that requires a ‘participation fee’ to be paid to designer participants of a contest.

You’ve heard us right! A base pay is paid to contest participants. Therefore, if it is making money online that’s topping your list of reasons for joining a graphic design contest site, then DesignCrowd is for you.

DESIGN OUTPOST is said-to-be unrivaled when it comes to crowdsourcing design projects. Like all other graphic design contest sites, projects are posted with intentions of having designers compete for its completion. Prize is awarded to a winner once project has reached satisfactory. DESIGN OUTPOST is known for its affordable rates despite claims that it houses great designers from all over the world. Of course, you’d be happy to give this site a try to see if you can find ‘these designers’ and probably learn from them. However, we must warn you that DESIGN OUTPOST screens applications of designers who would want to join their team so make sure to ‘dress to impress’ before braving yourself to fill out their application form and join their forums. Have a portfolio of samples ready for their review.

DesignContest is a community of creative designers who are looking to not just earn, but also learn more about honing their craft. In fact, the only designers from this contest site that are able to join design contests are only those who are able to pass the application process. In DesignContest, not only are online portfolios required, but a solid activity in their forums as well. A creative community that values work and learning, and not design trends alone, you can definitely find someone, to whom you can look up to as a role model for your starting career in design. But of course, it is always best to come prepared— ace their application process by actively participating in their forums and contributing ideas to the community, and by building your online portfolio. You see, it ‘pays’ to be an Elite member of this site. After all, learning while earning is a lot better than only learning, right?

This contest site is geared towards young creatives who offer no less than fresh ideas for the skins of the gadgets they love. Infectious encourages submission of works-of-art from ‘all kinds of designers’. It is just like the typical contest site that declares a winner after a particular period of time that an entry has been reviewed by the community (feedback rating) and after Infectious has decided that they liked the design, too. As obvious, the only difference is that Infectious itself (or the host of the contest) is also your client! Now, the best thing about Infectious is that it pays for your winning design, but only licenses it. You keep the ownership to the winning design! How does that sound? Cool, right? So, if you are cool and are capable of designing infectious artworks for gadget skins, then the Infectious design contest might just be the right gig for you.

With the advent of these contest sites in graphic design, it is now easier to find design jobs to help you make ends meet during tough times like this. Not only that, these sites can also awake the competitive side of you, which is an additional motivation for you to really do best at what you do best: at designing, and creating life out of art forms that we’re only once in paper.