freelancermap Brand Guidelines: A 2005 PHP Board Turned Nuremberg Project Platform

From one developer’s project to a Nuremberg platform.

freelancermap is a German project platform that brings together freelance specialists, mostly in IT and engineering, and the companies that hire them for fixed-term work. Its own history page says it was founded in 2005 in Wiesbaden by Nico Flemming and began as a platform for PHP developers, with a clear technical focus, before widening into an offer for the whole project business. Its owner tells the start a little differently: a September 2025 success story on the website of the Nuremberg group müller x net says freelancermap began as the solo project of a Hamburg developer, so the two company accounts differ on the city.

The decisive step came in 2009, when the platform was taken over by Müller Medien, the Nuremberg family media group, according to both freelancermap and its parent. The parent’s history page, published in August 2025, traces the group back to 1950, when it began as a telephone-directory publisher, the Fernsprechbuch-Verlag Hans Müller KG. The same page says the business was reorganised as Müller Medien around 2000 and, for its 75th anniversary in 2025, took a new brand, müller x net. Its other businesses include the children’s publisher Tessloff, home of the WAS IST WAS series, and the small-business marketing network SELLWERK.

The operating company today is freelancermap GmbH, based in Nuremberg. In June 2021 the trade magazine Computerwoche described it as the Nuremberg project platform, and it used the same description again in July 2022. The English-language site says the company launched freelancermap.com in 2012 to reach an international market, and that a new managing director took over in 2017 with a focus on service and closeness to customers.

The parent presents the deal as a partnership with the founder rather than a simple purchase. Its 2025 story says the group gave the founder room to concentrate on his core business while it developed the platform strategically and operationally, and it now describes freelancermap as established above all in the German-speaking region, with a project offer mainly in IT and technology and use possible worldwide.

Projects, profiles and a yearly study.

The platform works like a project board. Companies and recruiters post projects; freelancers create a profile, apply for work or are found through search. The German home page groups current projects into development, engineering, design, consulting and marketing, and in November 2026 it said it listed more than 14,800 open projects and more than 121,700 active freelancers; its FAQ gives more than 280,000 registered freelancers and more than 2,000 projects posted each week. freelancermap calls itself the largest project platform for freelancing in the German-speaking countries; that is its own description. Its parent gave a different set of figures in September 2025: about 94,000 active profiles, roughly 10,000 projects to choose from and 32,000 companies.

The company’s other public face is research. Since 2016 it has run the Freelancer-Kompass, a yearly survey of self-employed specialists. Computerwoche reported in July 2022 that the study is carried out every year across Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with around 70 questions answered by more than 2,000 IT freelancers, and that freelancermap collects, evaluates and analyses the results; a June 2021 article on the 2020 edition counted more than 1,800 participants and said that year’s analysis looked at how the level of education shapes the working life of self-employed specialists in IT and engineering. The parent adds, as its own figure, that around 70 per cent of the freelancers on the platform hold a university degree. The company calls the 2026 edition Germany’s largest market study for freelancers, the self-employed and independent professionals.

Its press page adds shorter surveys between editions, among them a poll on how many freelancers are thinking of moving abroad and a comparison of German cities as freelance locations, set against measures such as freelancer density and housing costs. Alongside the research, the site runs a blog with guidance on tax, finance and contracts for the self-employed, and on its pages for companies it promotes free project listings and search across freelancer profiles.

Profiles, briefs and showcases.

Freelance and creative-talent marketplaces describe themselves in a small set of words. DesignCrowd’s about page calls it an online creative marketplace that connects businesses with a global network of designers; English Wikipedia describes Crowdspring as a marketplace for crowdsourced creative services. Category names on these sites are practical rather than poetic: logo and identity, web, print, product and merchandise, art and illustration, with designer directories sorted by type, country and city.

The client’s first screen is usually a brief. When Slate tested Crowdspring in May 2011, posting a job meant filling in a “creative brief” form with set questions about what a logo should communicate. Contest sites then add their own rules on top of the brief. DesignCrowd’s how-it-works page lets a client choose a three-, five- or ten-day deadline, keeps designers from seeing one another’s entries and passes full copyright in the winning files to the client.

Showcase work is presented plainly, as entries and finished projects rather than as campaigns. Slate found that anyone could browse other people’s projects and, in many cases, their submissions, and that the site prompted clients to rate entries on a five-star scale and send feedback. Forbes reported in 2009 that Crowdspring offered larger buyers a Pro option that hid submissions from public view, and that its own logo came through its marketplace.

Corporate pages fill in the rest. DesignCrowd’s about section names its founder and chief executive and has a separate board and investors page listing its venture backers, while dated press releases record new country sites and new brands. This guide sets out what can be checked about each marketplace — who founded it, who owns it and how its interface works — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A slogan, four values and a 2025 relaunch.

The identity is built around a slogan, “Home of Freelancing,” which heads both the German and the English home pages, and a mission line that work should adapt to people rather than the other way round. The company’s history says it took its next step in 2025 with a brand relaunch, which it describes as more modern, clearer and closer to its community. On its own pages the name is written as one word in lower case, and the about page sets out four values: community, data expertise, support and comfort.

The research is part of that identity. The about page presents the Freelancer-Kompass as the place where the company shares its data with members, and the home page carries the latest edition next to the project search. The trade press picks the figures up: Computerwoche built articles in 2021 and 2022 around the study’s results, naming freelancermap as the platform behind them.

For a design guide, freelancermap shows how a specialist project board can rely on a plain lower-case name, a short slogan and its own yearly study. Compare Malt, another European freelance marketplace, and twago, a Berlin marketplace of the same period that took a different path. For this guide we use a deep teal, a warm sand and a signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep freelancermap’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.