Learnings from crowdsourcing my company logo

I’ve been writing quite a bit about crowdsourcing on this blog. So it was about time to ‘walk the talk’ and gain some experience myself with it. Creating my own company gave me the ideal opportunity to test it out, so here are some thoughts on what I’ve learned from the experience in crowdsourcing my company logo:

To crowdsource or not to crowdsource? 

Before I started I wondered whether there were any downsides for crowdsourcing. The upsides are quite obvious: for a low cost you can tap into a multitude of creative brains. But what about the negative side?

 I found a couple of articles stressing the downside of crowdsourcing. Perhaps the most convincing argument was a short study showing that the most successful creators on a number of crowdsourcing sites had ‘win rates’ of inbetween 2-15% (the number of their submissions that ultimately won the prize vs. the number of designs they submitted). So, the argument goes, it is not really worth the effort for true designers to earn a living with crowdsourcing.

It is a good argument, but it’s got its weaknesses:

• I can think of multiple reasons why a good designer would want to earn a ‘quick’ 300-500$ in his spare time; 
• If a designer submits 5-10 designs a day he could earn 3000-6000$ a month at a win-rate of 10%, which is a decent earning in many countries across the world; 
• A designer working on a logo through crowdsourcing can be asked by the buyer to make small changes to it during the contest. Apparently these are considered as multiple submissions, while it would have taken him only a minute or two. So if you take this into account the win-rate is probably much higher than 10% in average. 

Making the choice of crowdsourcing platform 

I shortlisted 4 crowdsourcing platforms that advertised specific focus on logo creation. After further investigation, I’ve put two of them aside: microburst.com (many of the examples of winning logo’s were a bit too playful for my means) and logotournament.com (a bit too pricy for the budget I’ve put aside for this 300$).

It was a hard choice between the two that were left, but ultimately I’ve selected Crowdspring on the argument that since it crowdsources other creative designs (websites, names, branding, etc), it would probably have a more diverse set of designer working on logo contests. Furthermore, the second platform (logomyway.com) has an awfully ugly logo for itself, which does not speak in its favor.

Are the submission any good? 

Well, you can judge by yourself by clicking here.

A couple of findings though:

• About 50% of submissions don’t care to read the brief or think a bit along the concept and business of the client; 
• I suspect (though am not sure) these are logo’s that were submitted for other contests or were laying in the drawer for a while; 
• The best submission occurred in the first 3 days. By the 3d day we already had a list of our 5 favorite designs. If I had to redo the exercise I would have reduced the project time from 7 to 4 or 5 days; 
• All designers are very responsive and open for feedback. 
• Well, it’s fun!!!

So which logo won?

The contest is still running for a couple of hours as I write this, so I can’t disclose.

But watch this space since I will start using the winning logo as from next Monday!