A place where creative work is judged, and nothing else is

Why we built it

If you make something and put it online, the first thing that happens to it is not judgement. It is distribution. A feed decides who sees it, and that decision is made mostly on the strength of your existing audience, the hour you posted, and how the piece performs in its first few minutes. A good drawing by someone with forty followers loses to a mediocre one by someone with forty thousand, and neither person learns anything about the work itself.

The competitions that exist to fix this often reproduce the same problem. Public voting is popularity with extra steps: whoever can mobilise the largest group wins, and the result says more about a person’s network than their craft.

We wanted a straightforward answer to a question that is surprisingly hard to get answered: is this any good? Not is it popular, not does it perform. Is the work good, in the opinion of people who do this for a living and who have no idea whose work they are looking at.

The decision everything else follows from

Blind judging is easy to promise and easy to quietly break. A judge who happens to recognise a style, or who scrolls past a name in an admin panel, has broken it without meaning to.

So we did not make it a promise. Judges on Kwickdo read entries through a restricted view of our database that contains no creator reference, no name, no age, no handle and no contact detail. The information is not concealed from them by policy — it is absent from the data they can reach. Scores attach to an anonymous token, and your identity is reconnected to your score only once every mark is locked.

Everything else on this site is downstream of that. Metadata is stripped from uploads because a photograph can carry a name and a location. Entries are private by default because publication should be your choice, not the price of entering. Consent to be named is invisible to judges, because otherwise it would be a signal. Scores cannot be edited once submitted.

What we believe

Age groups should compete separately. A four-year-old with a wax crayon and a professional illustrator with a tablet are answering the same brief, and both deserve a real result. They should never be ranked against each other, so they are not: three divisions, each with its own prize money and its own ranking.

A score should teach you something. A placing on its own is close to useless. You get your mark against each published criterion, so you can see whether the idea landed and the execution wobbled, or the reverse.

Your work is yours. Entering grants us a licence to run the contest and nothing more. We do not take a publicity licence, we do not sell your data, and we do not use your work to train AI models or hand it to anyone who does.

Claims should be checkable. We publish the panel before entries open, the criteria and their weights before you pay, and how closely the judges agreed once results are out. A panel that scattered wildly is visible to everyone, including us.

What we deliberately do not do

• No public voting deciding results, and no follower counts anywhere on the site
• No advertising, no advertising cookies, no tracking pixels, no third-party analytics
• No selling personal information, and no sharing it for behavioural advertising
• No using entries or portfolios to train machine-learning models
• No cut taken from commissions between a client and a creator
• No profiling, tracking or advertising directed at children

Where we actually are

We would rather tell you this plainly than imply a history we do not have.

Kwickdo is new. The platform is built and tested end to end — entries, payments, blind judging, scoring, results and portfolios all work — and our first open art competition is being prepared. We have not run a season yet, so there are no winner galleries, no testimonials and no participant counts on this site. When there are, they will be real ones.

The judging panel for the first contest is being confirmed. Until every judge has agreed, the panel section stays empty rather than being filled with names, and we will publish it before entries open so you know who is scoring your work before you pay anything.

We are starting with art, because it is where we can assemble a credible panel first. Design, photography, writing, film and music are planned, and we will open each one when we have judges for it rather than when it would look good on the homepage.

Who runs Kwickdo

Kwickdo is an independent platform, operated from Nagpur, Maharashtra, India, and open to entrants worldwide. The agreement between us is set out in our terms, and how we handle your information is set out in full in our privacy policy.

Everything on this site — the platform, the judging system, the writing and the artwork — was made in-house.

Work with us

Judges. If you work professionally in a creative field and would consider sitting on a panel, write to us. We publish every judge’s name and credentials, so it is a public commitment on both sides.

Schools and colleges. We run competitions for institutions and can act as an external panel for student work. See for schools and for colleges.

Brands. Put a brief in front of a body of creators and get a judged, ranked shortlist rather than a folder of files. See for brands.

Anything else. info@kwickdo.com. A person reads it.