Week 1 of this new company was a week for setting up. A long list was prepared, with design staff to be found.
Right below the ‘Find Designers’ on the to-do list was a new challenge ‘Design Company Logo’. The observant reader will notice that those two points kind of create one issue – no logo. So what to do – take the crowdSpring challenge!
CrowdSpring is a Crowd Sourcing website. You put a job out to the widest audience possible, in this case a design brief to a whole raft of registered designers. With a clear brief, price, and deadline, there isn’t much more to do apart from sit and wait (in this case 7days) for the deadline to approach.
As you can imagine we were nervous of the results. Would we get entries? Was the brief clear? Would the quality be what we are looking for?
The results themselves answer the questions. Yes, we got entries, 202 to be precise. It seems in most cases the brief was clear, though some designers thought the ‘Studio’ meant we recorded music (and for those still unclear, we don’t). And, yes, we got some good entries, at least 10 make the grade, and there will be a decided winner some time this week. Oh, and there are some no-goes to. Please can someone who uses Word art NOT be welcomed into a design community!
Overall we are very happy, and will take, and work with, our new $400 brand. There are some things to remember though, when working with crowd sourcing.
1. It’s not for everyone.
We used crowdSpring because we didn’t, at the time, have the time to run the logo ourselves, but we DID know what we wanted from the brief, and how to decide. That is because we are creatives, and have designers around us to help with the advice and decision process.
2. Feedback is king.
We learnt quickly that feedback is key and helps you get the design you want. We left feedback with creatives who had designed something we liked, and nearly always got a new version within a few hrs. A great way to work.
3. You get what you pay for.
This is the start of our branding process, and whilst it won’t be wholesale changes, we will tweak and amend as we use the brand. The crowdSpring system generates a contract, and we will have EPS / AI files of the chosen design.
Overall, it has worked, but it’s not for clients, it is for the people who know how to brief, manage, and feedback on a project. Because we have been involved in the evolution (all be it on a short time scale) we know where we will go with the usage of the new logo, for cards, web and other applications.
We’ll post the winning logo when it’s delivered, and you can watch how we grow to use our new brand! If anyone is wandering, we probably wouldn’t use it again, but only because we now have our own team, who can themselves learn from this experiment in crowd sourcing.
[The facts and figures are in this blog post because the crowdSpring system is public, so if you can find it, you can review all of the entries received]
) in future posts.
