We have our first winner of the Designers Pool. Congratulations to teamRN for his creative work for the Fractured logo contest. He will be receiving the prize of $86 this month.

Our new affiliate program will be launching on June 15. You can earn $10 for every contest creation that you refer, plus $2 for every contest referred by and affiliate that signs up under you. This is a commission of over 30%, so you don’t want to miss out.

Sign up here.

We just got done adding a new RSS feed for our contest listings. Now you can get updates to our contests in a feed reader of your choice!

Subscribe here.

The Designers Pool for May will carry over into June, due to our later than expected launch.

We are finally ready to open up Designers Contest.  All contest listings will be free until June 15th. After that, it will be $29 to list your contest on DesignersContest.com.

We want to continually come up with ways to reward designers who spend the time to make this site possible.

The first of which is the Designers Pool.  You can read about how the Designers Pool works here.  This is for the designs, that, for some reason or another, didn’t win a contest.  But they’re still quality designs.

We’ll be adding more features in the coming months.  A few we have lined up:

1. Comprehensive Leaderboards for Designers - This wll make it easier to get your name out there to potential clients.  This will be determined by a complicated algorithm based on contests won and the average rating of all designs entered.  So theoretically, you could be on the list without even winning a contest, if you’re designs have been give 4 and 5 stars. We’ll have an ALL TIME Top Designers list and a PAST 90 DAYS Top Designers list.

2. Bonuses.  The Contest Holder, after awarding the winning design, can choose to give bonuses to other designs he thought were good and almost met what he wanted.  Once this is implemented, we will be highly encouraging Contest Holders to at least reward their 2nd choice with some bonus cash.

3. For designs that might be reusable, we’ll eventually offer an aftermarket store, where designers will get a majority of the money for designs they sell.  This will mostly apply to stuff like T-Shirts, web templates, etc.

These features are all aimed to make sure that a designers work is not done in vain, and they have multiple chances to get compensated for it, even if they don’t win a contest.

Please follow us on twitter for updates and notifications of popular contests.

As part of the launch, we’re giving away a free $250 logo contest.  To enter, simply follow us on twitter and retweet the following:  “@dcontests Win a Free Logo contest from http://www.designerscontest.com.  See details here: http://tinyurl.com/winalogonow”

We’re getting ready to officially launch, and everyone is really excited.  We just got done adding our Designers Pool functionality, which is the first feature of many we will be adding in the future to increase value for designers.