Im not sure how Designatron has many 5 star reviews or what scale of projects he has worked on before but my experience with him was not good. I will try to explain as detailed as i can.
Our project was a Logo for a creatine gummy brand which we did a contest for, followed by product packaging for the same product. We were looking to get a designer who could make the logo along with the packaging later so that he would be invested in this from the beginning. In the contest we selected Designatron as the winner with the agreement that we would fix up any changes to the logo once we start work on the packaging. We had made it clear that this product will be sold on amazon and it is a consumable product that has to follow certain regulations in regards to the copywrite, supplement facts, quantity of goods etc. in order to comply with Amazons policies. I had provided a link to the policies in the references for him to read over and get familiar with. I don't think he did that and that was reflected in the designs we were getting. We had asked multiple times for a label mockup but we kept getting full product packaging mockups that didn't show the whole label. After explaining 3 times what we needed, did he finally begin to send us the mockups in the proper format. That took at least a week of time before he understood and we got the proper format.
Next come the designs themselves. I turned to creative designer because i cannot translate my creativity onto a label by myself so i expected a 5 star rated designer to have the knowledge, creativity and expertise to be able to do that. In the beginning we had asked for a few examples and every one that we got was very generic and could have been made by myself on canva. It didn't have any design special features and in some cases was just a copy of some reference pictures we provided. 15 days in and i passed the project over to my marketing team to take over talks with Designatron hoping that maybe it was my fault and that I wasn't explaining myself properly. They have worked with designers in the past so they know how projects like these work and how detailed the briefs have to be. After another 3 weeks of them trying to explain in more detail what we needed and providing reference pictures to other brands, we still couldn't get what we were looking for. I had noticed that the only times that we would get an answer from him would be between 10pm and 2am his local time which could be an indicator that this is just a side gig for him. The time difference and always waiting 12+ hours for replies to our inquiries added to the time spent on this.
After weeks of trying, we began looking for other designers through Fiverr and locally to take this over. A project that we were hoping would take 2 weeks has already dragged on to 2 months and we still do not have a finished product so we decided to end our work with him and seek a different designer to finish this project which has been a challenge on its own because we had spent already $700 upfront between the contest and this product packaging on 99Designs and have wasted 2 months with no results. In my experience, paying upfront hasn't worked for us because you don't know the level of expertise your chosen designer has until you start working with him and once you start, if you're not happy with him then you've just lost money because he will tell you that he will finish the project but it will take you months and months of explaining him every detail of his job which he should already know.
Anyways, after looking online for DIY logos or help from AI, we have come across multiple examples of logos that we had offered to us by the designers on 99Designs. If they are using the AI systems online to make logos for people using this program, i don't think they should be charging the money that they are.
To conclude, i think 99Designs should improve their vetting process or tier the designers differently so these problems don't happen again. As for Designatron, he needs to improve his craft and get more creative. Maybe its a language barrier that was partly to blame here as well.
約1年前