FAQ for designers

Clients initiate competitions. After uploading basic information, they decide on the timeline and award amount. Designers are able to review all posted competitions and sign-up to participate in the design challenges. Designers can upload their design solutions until the project deadline. After the deadline the client evaluates the projects and picks the winning design scheme, and informs arcbazar about their first three ranked projects. Arcbazar then distributes the award among the first three winners.

The duration of the competition is decided by the client, and depends largely on the size and time commitment of the client. They can be short competitions for conceptual ideas lasting for about a week, or longer competitions that can last up to 12 weeks.

The minimum number of designers is two for all competitions. For most competitions, there is no upper limit. However, clients can limit the number of participants for their competitions. In that case, the project description would explicitly mention the limitation.

Arcbazar's clients range from homeowners and property developers to commercial businesses, hospitality operators, and institutional organisations. Our competitions have been used for single-family homes, apartment renovations, restaurants, hotels, offices, retail spaces, public buildings and landscape projects of all sizes. Any client who wants multiple design ideas from talented professionals around the world — at a transparent, competitive price — is a good fit for Arcbazar.

Arcbazar is open to all talented designers, students, young architects and professionals all around the world.

The identities of the clients and designers will be kept strictly confidential, unless they decide themselves otherwise. You will get an alias for each competition you participate in. This allows designers to keep anonymous, and makes sure that the winning project is selected by merit only.

Try clearing your browser cache and cookies, or use a different browser such as Chrome, Firefox or Safari. You can also sign in using your Google or Apple account if you registered that way. If the problem persists, contact us at support@arcbazar.com.

No. Voting is off by default and only applies after your competition deadline. You can turn it on from your Submissions page — either before or after you submit your final ranking — to get feedback from the Arcbazar community. Either way, the votes have no impact on your ranking: you always decide the winners.

Browse the Running Competitions page, where you can filter by category: residential, commercial, institutional, interior and landscape. Before signing up, read the brief carefully and check the award and the deadline, so you only enter competitions that fit your skills and the time you have.

If you sign up but do not submit by the deadline, you will receive a point deduction (−20 points) and the entry fee is not refunded. If you are having technical difficulties submitting, contact support@arcbazar.com before the deadline — we are happy to help. If you know in advance you cannot complete the project, it is better not to sign up so the client's designer count stays accurate.

Voting allows the Arcbazar community to evaluate completed designs across four criteria: beauty, function, buildability and graphic quality, on a scale of 1–10. After a competition closes, the client can choose to open their entries to public voting — it is off by default and opt-in. Voting gives you community feedback on your work, and your scores contribute to your overall profile rating.

All registered members of the Arcbazar community, designers and clients, can vote. Notice that designers cannot vote on their own projects.

Yes, Arcbazar regards voting as an honorable service by designers, and understands this feedback loop as an ongoing effort by designers to mentor/judge their peers. Therefore the system issues points for voting on projects, in order to promote, foster and strengthen our community.

The system does not allow voting on your own projects.

Votes have no direct impact on the ranking of projects. Clients can rank projects in any order they see fit. However, votes do have an impact on how projects are shown on Arcbazar's Top Competitions pages. The more votes and the higher the average the higher the project is listed on these pages.

Expert voters are designers that made it into the Top 100 of the overall designer charts on Arcbazar.

Everybody registered on Arcbazar can vote, however, the higher the designer in the overall designer charts the more weight is given to their vote. The average is calculated based on an algorithm that weights user-, expert-, client- and family/friends votes differently.

Both is possible. Every competition whose results have been announced by clients is showcased at the "Past Competitions" section on Arcbazar, and any user can vote on them at that point. However, there is also a paid feature, which allows clients to open their competition and get voting feedback from users before they make their announcements.

Yes. You can choose either option:

Pay per competition. The participation fee is 2% of the competition's award: $5 for a $250 competition, $15 for $750, $40 for $2,000. You pay it when you take part in a competition.

Subscribe for $250 a year. Take part in as many competitions as you like, with no participation fees. The subscription renews automatically each year. You can cancel at any time; it then stays active until the end of the year you've paid for and doesn't renew.

If a competition is cancelled, we refund your participation fee as soon as possible.

Browsing competitions, voting and your portfolio stay free. When you win an award or a bonus, we keep a 3% service and handling fee from the amount.

The first 3 ranked projects will receive monetary awards, e.g. the winner will receive %60, the runner-up %30, and the third %10 of the award money.

All your earnings will be displayed in your “My Bank” page. (Go to “My Home” and click on “My Bank” on your dashboard.) Here you can see all your earnings that you either won through a competition. You can withdraw any positive balance at any time in three ways: PayPal, direct deposit to your bank account or MoneyGram. Click on the “Withdraw” button, and decide on the amount and the transfer method, and your money will be transferred ASAP. Payment is done periodically within few days, therefore once you withdraw money from your account, you will receive a confirmation email when the payment has been done.

Yes. If you decide to use affiliate company products in your designs, please tag them after you have uploaded them onto Arcbazar. All relevant affiliate companies and their products will be listed at the Info tab at each competition page. At the end of the year we will be sharing 10% of all product sales proceeds with all designers, proportionally. In other words, the more tags you have in your designs, the more money you can earn.

Because many of you asked for it. With AI tools, anyone can now put together a set of images in minutes, and competitions were getting more and more quick, careless entries. They crowd out the work of designers who study the brief and develop a real proposal, and they make it harder for clients to find the designs that matter. A small participation fee, 2% of the award or $250 a year for as many competitions as you like, keeps competitions for designers who mean it. Clients receive more professional proposals, and your work gets the attention it deserves.

Arcbazar Pro is an annual subscription of $250 a year that lets you enter as many competitions as you like without paying the per-competition entry fee (2% of each competition's award). It pays for itself once the entry fees you would otherwise pay add up to more than $250 in a year. You can choose Pro when you sign up for a competition, and manage your subscription from your My Home page. It renews automatically every year until you cancel.

Yes, you can participate as a team in a competition. You can form as many teams as you need. You can create teams just for one competition, or teams you think will participate in multiple competitions.

The team leader (the designer who creates the team) has two options: 1. payment of entire award to team leader only, or 2. distributing the award among team members. For example for option 2, if your team wins an award of $1,000, and you have 5 team members, each member will get $200 to their accounts. Points are distributed in either case proportionally among team members.

No, you can invite as many designers to your team as you need. These members can be from within or outside the Arcbazar community. There needs to be at minimum two designers in a team, otherwise the system will show the team leader as an individual designer participating in the competition.

The system will create a separate team profile page, showcasing all projects that this team submitted on Arcbazar. These team pages will receive points as well, and be ranked separately in the designer charts. Each team page will list all team members and provide links to each member's profile page. Team projects will also be shown separately in each member's portfolio page.

Once a designer decides to join a team, and that team participates in a competition, the designer cannot participate separately in the same competition. However, you can participate individually in any other competition your team does not participate in.

SpaceApp is Arcbazar's mobile app. SpaceApp tells you as soon as a new competition opens, lets you follow the competitions you take part in, and brings you closer to clients through the Open Studio and competition rooms.

Get it at arcbazar.com/app.

It works like a client walking into an architecture office. When a client is online in SpaceApp, a green box shows that their studio is open, and any designer can join and talk with them, live.

It is a chance to understand what the client really wants, and for the client to meet the people behind the designs.

Every running competition has its own online room in SpaceApp, where the client and the designers taking part can meet, ask questions and get answers while the designs are being made.

Clients can ask SpaceApp's AI for a score and a short note on each design, to help them compare many proposals. The AI does not rank the designs or choose the winners: the client does, as always.

A clear presentation that answers the brief point by point helps both the client and the AI understand your design.