I know this may get me an Inbox full of e-mails from traditional graphic designers out there, but my colleague Robert Dillingham has passed along an article about a great way to bootstrap your logo design using a site called LogoTournament. From Zack Stern at PC World:
The site inverts the idea of one designer spending a lot of time; here many designers spend a little time, each submitting their ideas. The winner nets my prepaid bounty, and I get full rights to the logo.
I was a little skeptical to turn to the Internet masses versus a single designer. Anyone can upload ideas. But only a few days into my contest so far, I already have a few submissions that could work, among a dozen other attempts. As we get closer to my week-long deadline, I expect more designers to add entries. Other contests paying as little as $250 are getting 100 or more entries, but if you don’t get at least 30, LogoTournament offers a refund.
What a great example of the power of the Internet to connect small businesses to work together more effectively.
We usually use Elance for inexpensive logo design, but this looks MUCH, MUCH better.
With Elance, you pick a single designer out of a lot who bid on your project. So it’s hit or miss. Sometimes we end up with something great, and sometimes it’s just painful and bad.
I love this idea. Bookmarked it for my next project. Thanks!
I love these sites for quick idea prototyping. The community at Worth1000.com does a good job too.
We did a lot of prototyping but when we decided on an idea, we hired an individual designer to take it the rest of the way. I’m glad we did because we’re thrilled with the result.
99designs.com is also a tremendous site. It’s very similar to logotournament.com. You create a contest for your project, then allow a community of nearly 40,000 graphic designers enter their best designs. Then, you select the winner and they receive the prize winnings for your contest.
Cool find. I know in addition to Logo Tournament and 99 Designs that Crowdspring is quite popular.
I believe that 99 designs is the reigning provider in this space.
If you Google “crowdsourcing design” or “crowdsourcing web design” or “crowdsourcing logo design”
One final way is to Google competitors or alternatives to 99 Designs. I think a Venture Beat profile will come up with competitors. Crunchbase as a vertical search engine has similar data.
Its amazing how many of these sites have cropped up in the past few years. Others not mentioned above include Hatchwise, Logo My Way, Design Crowd, Logo Arena, Mycroburst, Logo Design Guru, 48 Hours Logo and DesignContest.com. Some just do logos but others offer crowd sourcing for any design or creative tasks.
While they all differ slightly you are best to go with one of the original sites as the designers spend more time there so you’ll get more activity for your project.
The reaction by designers towards this new business model has been as you would expect. But the benefits to the consumer are just to great for this option to go away any time soon.