Last year at SXSW, I interviewed Jason Aiken from crowdsourced design service 99designs. The service is described as, “We connect 62,177 passionate designers from around the globe with small businesses who need design projects completed. And, we do it in a timely fashion without the usual risk or cost associated with professional design.” Basically 99designs allows companies to create “contests” and then designers submit their designs for the contest. The company selects a winner and pays for the selected design. Some call this type of relationship, “spec work” – the concept was a hot topic last year at SXSW. There’s a group called No!Spec which discusses the spec work topic indepth.

While waiting to get into the Mashable party, I caught up with Jason to find out how 99designs is doing a year later. Check out our brief discussion in the video below. The big news out of 99designs is the launch of their logo store. Designers who have won at least one competition on 99designs can then create stock logos and place them in the logo store. Companies and small businesses can quickly select a logo for $99 with non-exclusive rights (or they can pay $300 for exclusive rights) and then the designer will customize the logo with the company name, etc. in 24 hours.

Jason also shared some current stats related to 99designs. He noted that 500-600 projects are uploaded each week, a new design for a contest is uploaded every 7 seconds and they hand out $600,000 a month to the contest winners.

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99designs is a service that was born in the Sitepoint forums which allows designers to "bid" on contests. The company describes the service as, "99designs connects clients needing design work such as logo designs, business cards or web sites to a thriving community of 30,023 talented designers."

99designs launched last year at the DEMO conference. So far 99designs has helped run 19,000 contests, awarded $4 million dollars and more than 50% of the contests lead to follow-on work. The company was founded and invested by Sitepoint executives.

Check out my chat with Jason Aiken, Business Development Manager at 99designs:

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