Designing a new logo can be a daunting proposition, but giving your company a new look is a simple and inexpensive way to breathe new life into it. In most cases, an old formula is used, but this process has a one fundamental flaw: It doesn’t always work.
The traditional way to go about designing a new logo for your website, advertising and business cards has four steps:
- Find a few graphic designers or design firms.
- Call them and ask a few questions to determine if they meet your standards.
- Choose the designer you like best.
- Hope that you like the design, and it does its job of fully representing your business.
Although the traditional design process is still the most widely used, a new standard is quickly gaining popularity, and it is based on crowdsourcing. One of the companies relying on crowdsourcing is 99designs.com. When you register at 99designs.com, you are starting a design contest and awarding the top contestant a prize rather than paying outright for the service.
In your contest, you are allowed to provide guidelines and as much information about your company and what it is you are looking for specifically. For instance, you can ask for specific colors or let contestants know the primary demographic you need to reach.
Once you have fully developed your contest, you will begin to receive submissions that you can then rate on a five-star scale. Furthermore, you can provide feedback so that designers can modify their submissions to be more to your liking.
After about one week, you will narrow the field to your top five designers. These finalists then receive time to refine their logos until one stands out above the rest. When a winner is chosen, you are able to download the logo or advertisement, and the prize award is released from an escrow account.
Read the full article by Jason Pliml of Moraware here: Outsourcing Design (aka Looking Good on a Budget)
