Making Graphic Designers Come to You

Need graphic design for your website or a new logo for your company? Maybe your business has other artistic needs, but you don't want to shell out the money to contract an artist. A new website, crowdSPRING, may be your answer. It applies the Web 2.0 treatment to commercial graphic design.

As the buyer of art, you create a profile on the website about the kind of project you want and how much you're willing to pay. Then artists, who also have profiles on the site, will submit their best cracks at your project (actual work, not proposals), and you can choose the one you like and "award" the designer the money you said you'd pay. Payment is held in escrow by crowdSPRING until the deal is done. Here's how the site describes the process:

When working with traditional creatives, the buyer takes all the risk—they pay up front and hope their project turns out well. When working on many other sites, creatives take all the risk—they do the work up front and hope to get paid in the end.

We've tried to find a balance that works for everyone. Here, the buyer pays up front and the creatives get to work right away. We promise buyers that if they don't get at least 25 entries to their project then they can walk with a full refund. In return, we promise creatives that their projects won't go cancelled or abandoned for no good reason.

So ideally, the power of competition will mean you won't have to put up as much money as you would if you looked for an artist yourself.

The site says more than 3,000 artists have joined crowdSPRING and more than 200 projects have been submitted. A lot of these sites don't last long, but this one seems worth a try.