What is a Community Contest

Unlike Professional contests which are open for Elite Designers only, Community Contests are open for all registered members of DesignContest.net community. It is a place to express your creativity in an atmosphere of freindly competition learning new things in the process and/or helping other designers to improve. The whole community can participate. Even if you don't have design skills, you can still post comments about others' entries.

A Community Contest can be considered as an exercise in graphic design. We post contests on various topics covering all areas of design from simple sketching and composition exercises to photo manipulation and illustration. The ideas are based on your suggestions that you can post in the Community Contests section on the forums.

How does it work?

As I have mentioned before any member of DesignContest.net can participate. Even if you are not registered just yet, you may do it right now and in three minutes, when it is finished you will be able to upload your images too.

The image you upload will be automatically reduced to 640x480 pixels, so it might be a good idea to reduce your image to this resolution to check how it will look on the contest's page. The script will also insert some information about the entry (DC logo, contest title, your username, and the date it was submitted).

In the beginning you have a right to submit maximum three entries. Don't rush. Personally I prefer to wait a little bit. Even if you had a revelation and came up with a super cool design, it never hurts to put it aside for at least a couple of hours and look at it again then, most of the times you will see things that you didn't notice before and could improve.

The main reason we limit the number of entries is to let you choose the ones that you think are the best. I know that some of us can be very productive and come up with tons of revisions and variations, but just imagine what would happen if every designer uploaded a hundred of entries. And I prefer that you do the quality screening yourself than make the moderators remove low quality and irrelevant entries. After all it might be very subjective.

I will still remove irrelevant entries though. Reading the brief is an important part of design work. You should be able to understand what a client wants (just imagine the contest holder is a client) and find a way to integrate your creativity into the frame of what is asked in the brief.

After you submit your entry other members may submit their comments about your design. The contest holder may review it and he will also put a note. The notes are the following:

ok - your entry has been accepted as it is. It probably means that the contest holder likes it and doesn't want to you to change it. In other words it is included into the list of entries to choose the winner from later.
needs work - it means that the contest holder finds it interesting but there might be minor details that could be improved. He may or may not specify what exactly he would like you to change in this entry
definitely wrong - this one is quite clear, it is not something the contest holder is looking for. Try a different direction if you have more entries left

Elite Design Team

I think it is worth to mention that it is a guaranteed way to be accepted to the Design Team to win 3 community contests. You should still pass the poll on the forums though. But with 3 community contests won, I believe many members will recognize you.

Prizes and Sponsors

Prizes in community contests are simple, most of the time it is our official t-shirt. But sometimes a contest might be sponsored, in this cases the prize depends on the sponsor's generosity. Why people would sponsor a Community Contest if they cannot use the result for commercial purpose as in Pro Contests? Well, the reason is simple - a community contest is open for all the members of the community and it usually generates live interest and draws attention of thousands of visitors. All this means a lot of publicity for the sponsor and his products, especially if one of them is offered as a prize. If you are interested in sponsoring a community contest, please, contact the administration with your propositions.