Your Tech Story

Designer

99designs

99designs – Hire The Best Designers For Your Business

Leave a Comment / start-up, Tech Story / By

Designing is a very crucial part of any business. With digital marketing becoming the ruler of the empire, one needs to hire top-class designers for the company. It varies from company to company whether they want to hire a designing team or hire freelancers. But, with freelancers, things get easier and faster. You hire them, assign a job, set a deadline and the job is done. When it comes to freelancers, many websites provide the service of hiring freelancers. Websites like Fiverr, Freelancers.com are ruling the market for a very long time. But, they tend to cover most of the categories needed for business operation. For example, content writers, graphic designers, software developers, web designers, etc. 99designs is a platform that is solely created for connecting graphic designers to the clients. Matt Mickiewicz and Mark Harbottle founded the company in 2008. The company’s headquarters are based in Melbourne, Australia.

About the Founders

Born in Poland, Matt moved to Germany at a very young age. He was very much interested in developing websites and designing them as well. Matt created his first website, SitePoint at the age of fourteen and after a couple of years, he met Mark Harbottle. When he was in high school, he managed both attending classes and his advertising business.

Matt met his business partner only at the age of sixteen and established 99designs as an independent company in 2008. In 2011, Matt came in the list of 30 Under 30 Entrepreneur by Forbes and INC. He attends seminars and conferences around the world as an important speaker.

Mark Harbottle has plenty of experience in the entrepreneurial world. He co-founded 99designs in 2008 and presently invests in many companies. He has co-founded other companies as well which includes Flippa.com, Learnable.com, and SitePoint (parent company of 99designs and later spun off). He is the Founding Investor at Elto.com, Hired Inc., Influx Inc, and Assembly Payments.

How did it start?

Matt created SitePoint when he was in high school. But, then he didn’t know it would take a bigger shape in the future. Initially, the people at SitePoint competed with each other regarding who could create the best design. But, with a little entrepreneurial idea, the journey of 99designs started. They decided to design the logo and get a cash prize for the winner in return. And, finally, 99designs spun off from SitePoint.com.

Success and Growth

After Matt and Mark established the company in 2008, they found that most of their clients and designers are from the United States. So, they opened an office in San Francisco. Currently, the U.S. headquarters are situated in Oakland, California. The company grew fast and by the next four years, 99designs had more than 175,000 designers from 192 countries. In 2009, the company became one of Australia’s top innovations.

In 2011, 99designs raised $35 million from Accel Partners for carrying out global expansion. By this time, the company had around 100,000 designers and hosted more than 75,000 projects. In 2012, 99designs acquired a European company, 12designer which later became the European headquarters of the company. In 2013, the company acquired LogoChef, one of Brazil’s leading designing company. This year the company also expanded its business to Latin America and the Netherlands providing Dutch version of it.

In 2015, the company raised another $10 million. Though the company mainly conducted competitions and see whose logo wins, after a few years, they decided otherwise. From 2016, the company allowed the clients to directly choose and hire designers from the registered designers. At the end of 2018, the company’s annual revenue summed up to $60 million.

In 2018, the company also announced that the total earnings of the designers crossed $250 million by the end of the year.

Why in demand?

The platform has turned out to be advantageous for both the clients and the designers. In 99designs, the clients are provided with the best designer as they are given the liberty of choice. On the other hand, the designers also don’t need to interact with every other client asking for the project. If you are a designer you only design your project. 99designs does the rest of the job. Through the span of twelve years, it has become successful in establishing trust among the company and clients.

Jonathan Ive – Chief Design Officer Of Apple

Inspiration, Story / By

A passion to do something and following your heart can take you places. Who would have thought that just being fond of designing would make Jonathan Ive the Chief Design Officer of the world’s most leading tech giant: Apple? he is serving the company for last 22 years and has designed some beautiful and innovative products.

Early Life
Ive was born in Chingford and raised in Staffordshire on 27th February 1967 under the guidance of his father Jonathan Jony Ive who was a lecturer and silversmith by profession. Ive got interested in drawing at very early and tender age of 14. Inheriting the skills from his father he started designing from jewelry to furniture and cars to boats.

Finally, after meeting few experts Ive decided to take a product designing course and joined industrial design at Newcastle Polytechnic. A hearing aid designed by Ive is kept on display in the London Museum of Design. Ive slowly started getting into technology and especially designing products using a Mac computer.

Beginning of Career
After the completion of his course Ive co-founded Tangerine – a London based design firm designing household products like kitchen and bathroom appliances. And Ive’s journey for Apple began from here. As Apple was one of the client’s at Tangerine they wanted him to join Apple after being impressed with his work. Robert Burner, the industrial design chief of Apple, hired Ive in 1992 and just in the next five years became the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design. Ive worked hard on the products such as the Newton MessagePad 110, which was one of the forgotten Apple products. Ive was on the verge to quit Apple but Jon Rubinstein, senior vice president of hardware engineering, gave him a raise and persuaded him to stay.

The Leap
Good that Ive took Rubinstein’s advice and stayed because in the coming years he would design some of the most famous Apple products like 1998’s iMac, 2001’s iPod, 2007’s iPhone, and 2010’s iPad. These were the groundbreaking designs by Ive which raised the bar of his reputation higher and higher. The uniqueness of the designs brought by Apple made them stand out in the market and a lot of other companies even copied the designs. Ive’s latest design is the Apple Watch.

Under Steve Jobs, Ive was given complete freedom to explore new ideas and designs. After the death of Jobs, some additional responsibility was put on Ive’s shoulders including the handling of software along with the hardware. He also has a personal design lab and is one of the most secret areas at Apple’s headquarters. And only a handful of people can actually enter this personal lab.

Ive holds more than 730 US design and utility patents as of 2014. Many more patents are yet to arrive in the future. He was awarded various awards recognizing his work in the design field. Ive lives with his wife Heather Pegg and twin sons in the Pacific Heights district of San Francisco, California.

Ive believes in charity and has developed products like the Leica Camera and Jaeger-LeCoultre sports watch which were sold at auction for charitable trusts. He considered Steve Jobs to be his closest friend and Jobs considered him to be his ‘spiritual partner’ at Apple.