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This article is from August 16, 2013, and is no longer current.

Swiftly Offers Quick Design Fixes for $15

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Many professional designers have strong negative opinions about crowdsourcing sites that host competitions in which many people submit work, but only one ends up getting paid. Some feel that the very notion of crowdsourcing undervalues their skills and undermines their ability to make a living.

However, the sites themselves appear to be thriving. To date, 99designs.com has hosted over 200,000 contests, and currently has nearly 1500 contests open for the creation of logos, websites, apps and more. So it should probably be no surprise that the people behind 99designs have expanded and launched a new twist on crowdsourcing in the form of swifty.com.

Swiftly pairs up designers and others with graphic production skills with companies and individuals who need simple, small jobs done quickly. You won’t find a request to design a new website on swiftly. Typical tasks are things like editing a business card, re-saving a file in a different format, editing a bit of text, retouching a photo, etc—the kind of jobs that could be trivial for someone with the skills and the software to do it, but potentially a real problem for anyone else.

According to the site, “Swiftly exists to save clients time and money while offering designers a convenient way to make money in their downtime.”

The flat fee for a job is $15. Swiftly takes a cut, so the person doing the work would take home somewhat less. The turnaround time for a job ranges from 20 minutes to an hour. 

So what do you think? Is this yet another way that those with design and production skills are undermined in the so-called “gig economy,” or is it just a way to earn a few bucks in the time you might otherwise waste looking at the internet’s infinite number of time sucks?

Editor in Chief of CreativePro. Instructor at LinkedIn Learning with courses on InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, GIMP, Inkscape, and Affinity Publisher.
  • Filipe says:

    Swiftly copies the concept of my own website: http://www.designhandyman.com. It’s a shame :-(

  • peterpica2 says:

    Yeh, it’s a shame…the web’s making everything cheaper, even the quality of the work too in most cases.

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