Dear Sirs

Design Crowd customers are in a win-win situation and even more so with your new Non Guaranteed payment option. From the designers perspective, we are now guaranteed absolutely nothing. Your clients are already encouraged to re submit their brief if they are not entirely happy with the results, which is bad practice. With Ebay, when the time is up, the highest bid gets the prize and the seller can't re-advertise the item just because he hoped for a highr figure!. 

The designers decision to submit designs for a particular brief are based on its requirement, the budget and duration of the posting, these 3 elements are his motivation to submit , together with your guarantee that payment is guaranteed for the 'winning entry' at the end of the posted period. This is blatently not the case, so may I recommend that you replace the 'Guaranteed Payment' text from your design contest pages, with ' Payment will only be made when client is satisfied'

In the REAL world of 'pitching' to a client, the process is the same EXCEPT that the contract is awarded to the designer based on the pitch, not the finished design, which is completed later following further discussion and refinement. Whilst you do have the option of 'Freelance' postings which offers a similar protocol, you still push the 'Design Contest', offering benefits that exceed all other options, which appears to be working because when I last checked, I saw just 3 'Freelance' briefs posted

By saying "if you don't like what they do, you don't have to pay", you are treating your designers as a throw away commodity, how dare you! As a business that relies on the cooperation and trust of both parties to achieve success, you have a responsibility to cater for the interests of both parties.

By offering all the assurances to the customer and non for the designer, you remove any motivation to submit anything other than (in my case), my need to complain. There will always be designers who are willing to work with these restrictions, but that does not make it right or ethical. You may be able to capitalize on their naivity in the short term, but there are many other sites out there who appear to be enjoying varying levels of success without alienating there patrons along the way.

Kind Regards

Brian Hutchinson

Well said Brian, Design 'Crowd,' must also cater for and respect the crowd, i.e designers. The reason you now offer a non-guaranteed option is because your/our clients are most likely not satisfied with the quality of submissions they recieve on a regular basis. Your whole customer policy is one sided. You have to realise that if you want to earn money from the folks who are putting up the cash, you must also cater for and respect those who are sweating over the actual work.You can't simply be the middle man here and sit on the fence waiting to get paid your cut. There must be incentives for both sides. I am quite new to this site and am a qualified designer with genuine industry experience. It is a useful service for me to be put in contact with new clients as I am travelling at the moment and enjoy the opportunity to pitch for freelance work. Your current model does not cater for or respect people who genuinely care about producing quality work and unsurprisingly your clients want a non-guaranteed option. This is a relatively new business model, there are many many websites that offer similar services to clients who are looking for multiple pitches. The businesses in this model that will succeed in the long-term are those that will cultivate and attract the best design talent to pitch to those clients.