Our community never ceases to amaze us. More than 47,000 designers from over 170 countries now work on crowdSPRING. We believe we have the best creative community in the world – and we constantly look for ways to make it even better.

Earlier today, crowdSPRING announced the winners of our SPRINGY awards. One of the winners, ArtbyAudree (Community Award) has done a wonderful job for clients, and has also been a huge help to us in the blog and in the forums. Choosing her for the Community Award reminder us how much we love and value Audree’s contributions. If you haven’t read it, take a look at our interview with Audree last year.

Some people have criticized us from the day we launched for not understanding the needs of designers. Because we must balance the needs of clients and designers, some of these criticisms have been misguided.

However, some criticisms have been spot on. While we employ designers on our team, they are focused on building crowdspring.com and directly on the community (although you’ll find them from time to time writing blog posts and participating in the forums). We’ve constantly looked for a way to build a stronger bridge to our community and we’re excited to announce today that we’ve found it!

Starting today, Audree will be working with us and actively contributing in the forums, looking at the scope of posted projects, and giving a helping hand to clients and creatives in projects. (Audree will not, during that time, work as a freelancer on crowdSPRING).

We believe in rewarding people for outstanding work – and we are so proud that we picked someone from our community for this role.

We’ll continue to actively participate and to listen to everyone’s feedback, suggestions, and criticisms. But now we’ll also benefit from Audree’s wisdom and insight – to help us better understand the soul of our community and to help us better understand the needs of creatives.

We’re excited! We hope you  are too.