TASK THREE: CHOICES: 99 DESIGNS

99 Designs is a design community where an illustrators, graphic designers, or web designers can compete in competitions for different commissions. There is a three level judging process that goes through a preliminary round of judging then onto finalists and then a 'final round where the winning design will be chosen. The competitions typically last between 3-7 days with sometimes over 100 entrants per competition and dozens of competitions to chose from. Some of the commissions include Book cover design, illustrations for an explanatory pamphlet to a logo design for a tech website. The prizes range from £150 to £1000 and over.

The first step is to join the community and create a profile, and then start looking for competitions to enter. There is no limit to the amount of competitions that you can enter but there is some ground rules.

You are not allowed to submit any copied or unoriginal designs (shocker!), you are not to copy the designs of any current entries and you are not allowed to divulge any of the information regarding any of the competitions. This makes It a little hard to document my research of such a competition though. Although putting my research for any of these competitions on a blog puts me at risk at getting banned from the community, i'm sure research in the form of a word document or sketchbook will be fine.

At the moment there are several competitions I am looking at. They all fall under the following catagories:

Book Cover Design.

Logo's. 

Magazine cover design.

Although I'm more than aware that the purpose of this brief is to lead us onto the most suitable path to a future in illustration and build up a relevant portfolio, It would be nice to enter some competitions that I actually have a chance of winning. I'm not pessimistic, but I am realistic. Competitions like Penguin, Puffin, and MacMillian are great, prestigous competitions but the entries are somewhere in the thousands and the actual probability of winning such a competition is minute. Also The type of subject matter touched in these type of briefs is not necessarily akin to the kind of jobs that  will be aiming to get in the first few years, post graduation. In addition to this, all three of these aforementioned briefs have a very long turnover, and do not realisticly represent the timeframe given to the type of commissions they are. For example entrants have many months to tackle the penguin design award brief but the majority of commissions I have researched in  the same field will typically be between 3 days and 2 weeks.

I am at a stage where I have started to get regular commissions and only really want to look for other competitions and competitions that have some resemblance to the work i am currently doing. this makes '99 designs' a viable resource for a potential multitude of commissions.