Ideas as follows:

1) Provide them with coaches or better real time support.
- Do they know that they can make choosing much easier by actually using the rating system? Do they know that there is an "order by" "Time" "rating" option that can show the top rated designers in order from highest ranking to lowest?
- Do they know that they can eliminated designs?
- Do they understand how important a good brief is?
- Do they know that they can control the direction that designers take by providing feedback?

2) 99 Designs should change the steps to a contest and include a step where they have a second brief to fill out as supplementary after they have received 25 unique designs. This brief could ask them more questions once they have seen some samples. The brief would helpl to narrow the scope of the project for both designer and CH.

3) 99 Designs should make submitting a series of a design concepts possible. When designers submit colour variations, stylized variations and tagline variations of THE SAME OR VERY SIMILAR DESIGN, it should go under one main image. Make is to when you scroll over that collection you get a quick view of the contents of the selection.

4) Let CH receive more designs to view ONLY AFTER RATING A BATCH. Meter out the designs in groups of 20 or 25 and hold back the rest until the CH rates these designs. Perhaps this could be part of the steps showing the progress of the contest.

- I and many others have found Contest holders offer high dollar payouts to get the best and most creative results. With that said, they get the best and most creative ideas from users for a small contest start up fee, yet abandon the contest, thus ignoring having to pay the high award.

- I think the best solution to this problem is to use the award amount as a basis which would reflect on the amount it would cost to launch a contest. So in a nutshell, the higher the award, the higher the contest start-up fee.

I have many specific links that address this issue but I will not post them unless requested. Thanks, hopefully others would like this issue to be resolved.

We gotta have this!

It might be cool to have an iPhone application created that we can all add for free where we will be able to manage our account.

Designers:
- Able to quickly see if their design has been rated or been left feedback.

- Withdraw an entry

- Check out new contests and add them into a favorites list so you can check them out when you get access to a computer.

Contest Holders:
- Rate And Give feedback to designs (The safari browser and the option to zoom should be a good enough view for them)

- Post comments on the contest, etc.

Nothing huge, just a nice little application so if we are on the road or somewhere with no internet access we can keep track of things and keep the communication close.

I would love to see a feature that displays the users of 99designs...like a memberlist perhaps? I think its very troublesome to not be able to lookup a designer/contest holder that had sparked my interest.

Currently, the only way I can find users is if I've messaged them, they've entered my contests, or they show up randomly on featured panes. Otherwise, if the contest has ended, or the designers did not have a winning entry, it's hard to re-locate them. I hope in the future, both designers and contest holders will be able to search for fellow 99designs users with much more ease.

Thank you!

Contestants (anyone from the community with high number of contests entered) should be able to rate designs normally (except their own) BUT no one (neither the CH nor the contestants) should be able to see any of these ratings until CH picks a winner.
Why? Simple, CHs sometimes make ugly final decisions for the wining design, the lower their picked design has been rated by the community the more the CH will consider buying the community's highest rated design from it's owner (no refund made from the initially picked winner).
If the CH decides to buy the community's highest rated design it will have the same price of the contest's prize and the CH's initially selected winner will have the rights of his/her design PLUS his/her award.

Change the way CHs eliminate designs by adding a feature that requires them to select the reason for elimination from a list of common shortcomings. This will automatically generate feedback to the designer as to why the design was rejected while speeding up the feedback process for the CH.

Examples of elimination reasons could be:

Does not follow brief
Style does not reflect audience/goals
Weak/unrefined concept
Lack of originality
Poor craftsmanship
Typography (font)
Other (selecting this would REQUIRE an explanation in order to process the elimination.)

The CH should be allowed to select all reasons that apply, and at least one would have to be selected in order for the design to be eliminated.

Hello!

I am very disappointed with 99designs work these days. you know friends now they respond my email and now let me show you these emails material.

1st Email from 99designs support:
------------------------------------------------

"Hi Muhammed,

Apologies for any delay in responding to your messages.

We are currently waiting on some documentation from the Contest Holder - we will let you know as soon as we are able to release the prize money.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Kind regards

Sapphira
99designs Support Team"

2nd Email from 99designs support:
------------------------------------------------
"Hi Muhammed,

Unfortunately, even though the contest was guaranteed, it has been detected by our system as being fraudulent.

Please forward any correspondence you may have had with contest holder Samuelx to us immediately.

We will appreciate your candid response.

Kind regards

Simon
99designs,com"

====================================================================

these 2 email represents what?,, tell me friends what that is that our responsibility to take care of contest holder or frauds, its all 99designs responsibility to check all these things before contest held, Well i almost spent 2 whole days on the design and after winning i handover the design (s according to the CH request and after doing all these thing i got nothing just a stupid statement "Please forward any correspondence you may have had with contest holder Samuelx to us immediately." we must protest against this kind of joke.

and 1 more thing i made a post named as "99designs responsibilities" and put all that material of these nonsense emails and when i woke up today and check the forum i found nothing the admin remove that post. i wanna ask "why"?

Please admin take some action except deleting this post. And please send my money because this is my right to receive my winning money, its not my concern that its fraudulent or not because 99design launched the contest and i already handover the designs.

thank you