This is a guest post by Andrea of So Over Debt. If you want to guest post, check out my guidelines here.
When I started blogging, I looked for ways to create a decent-looking site without spending money. After all, I didn’t know if I would stick with it or if anyone would ever read what I wrote. I experimented with my theme a little, added a sidebar, and made a logo using a free service. Compared to some of the other blogs I’d read, mine looked okay.
As my blog grew in popularity, I realized I wanted to convey a more polished image. I wanted my readers to feel like they were visiting a “real” website, not something homemade or thrown together at the last minute. My father, who has always run some sort of business on the side, insisted that I consider professional logo design to help my blog “take off.” He even offered to pay for it.
A Google search led me to 99designs, a site that facilitates design contests for logos, business cards, t-shirts, brochures, and even entire websites. Basically, you tell the designers what you’re looking for, offer a cash prize, and wait for someone to create the perfect design. The winner gets the money and you get a design that belongs to you. Since my dad was paying the $295 for a logo contest, I quickly signed up and began creating my contest.
How to Create a Design Contest
The process of creating a contest is super easy. There are questions to help you determine what style you like, then you can specify colors, describe your business and its audience, and list famous logos you’ve seen and liked. For me, the hardest part was describing what I wanted – I was better at explaining what I didn’t want.
For the first 3 days of my week-long contest, I didn’t receive any entries. I freaked out a little, thinking I didn’t explain myself well enough or my concept wasn’t interesting. Maybe I should have offered more than the $295 minimum. Apparently, though, this is just part of the process. Day 4 brought a trickle of entries, followed by a flood during the remaining 3 days.
As you receive entries for your contest, you are able to rate each entry and provide feedback to the designer. This is crucial to get the logo you want. I would offer comments like “The orange you used is a little too red” or “I don’t like the font – it’s too rounded.” This feedback enabled the designers to sort through my vague description of what I was looking for and create something usable.
Once I had several entries I liked, I decided to guarantee the prize. This means I was promising that someone would get the prize money, that I wouldn’t back out and say I didn’t like any of the designs. I received tons of entries after the prize was guaranteed.
Altogether, there were 104 designs submitted to my contest. Of those, probably 30 were logos I seriously considered. I narrowed down to my top 8 and let my readers vote for their favorites, but there was one that stood out among the rest. It became my current logo (below), which I love.
Feeling Guilty – Should I Cancel the Contest?
The first comment on my contest page contained a link to a website demeaning the 99designs experience. The site’s author argued that designers are spending their time and effort to create something for which they may never receive compensation. Good logo design can take hours, and the designers who take part in contests on sites like 99designs are wasting their time if their designs aren’t chosen. I had never stopped to consider that aspect of the design contest model.
Some of the designers reworked a design 5 or 6 times to meet my specifications, yet I knew they still hadn’t created something amazing enough to win the prize. Others submitted several different designs in hopes of interpreting my vision correctly. I started feeling pretty horrible about myself, like I was taking advantage of other people’s talents. Maybe I should just cancel the contest altogether, I thought.
I talked with my dad, who reminded me that no one forces designers to participate in logo contests. They choose to submit their work knowing they may not be chosen as the contest winner. Thinking of it that way helped alleviate my guilt, though I still wished there was some way to reward everyone who made an effort.
Tips to Manage a 99designs Contest
I would definitely recommend 99designs to anyone looking for a well-designed logo. A few tips if you’re considering a design contest:
- Think about what you’re looking for ahead of time so you can be as descriptive as possible in your design brief.
- Look at other design contests to get an idea of the information you’ll need to provide, as well as the characteristics of the contests getting tons of entries.
- Don’t get upset if it takes a few days to get entries.
- Provide detailed feedback on every single entry. This will help other designers figure out what you’re looking for.
- Consider offering more than the default prize amount. Even bumping it up by $5 will increase interest in your contest. (I didn’t do this and I wish I did!)
- If you hate a particular design, let the designer know exactly what you don’t like about it so he/she can try again.
- If a designer consistently submits entries that don’t meet your requirements, you can eliminate that designer from the contest entirely.
- If you’re reasonably sure you can pick a winner based on the entries you’ve received, guarantee the prize. You’ll see a huge surge in entries.
The End Result – A Great Logo
The logo I chose was created by a design student who had never won a contest before. She was very excited to be chosen, and she even did some extra work (an avatar, logos with and without the site tagline, one with the graphic above the title, and one with no graphic) at no extra charge. I later hired her to design my business cards, which incorporated my logo and looked WAY better than anything I could have done on my own.
I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback about my logo, especially from readers who saw the old one. My site feels more professional now, which is what I wanted all along. Overall, I would say my experience with 99designs was very positive. I would definitely use the service again for future logos or anything else I need for my website.
Feel free to leave your own review of 99designs here.
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Thanks for sharing your experience Andrea. I’ve always like the idea of 99Designs but have yet to try it out. I think I’m going to try it out for my own blog.
Hi,
Similar to my experiences getting logos for my project and for a friend.
In both cases the results way exceeded our expectations.
I think you should go back to feeling guilty
Nothing personal, but contests are an exploitive situation for designers. Professionals who could give you great work for a living wage (and therefore be around for you as your business prospers) are being dragged down to the lowest price students or part timers or people in cheaper living conditions might offer. Perhaps guilt isn’t the right emotion – but whatever feeling the undermining of the newspaper writer or the crisis in the photography industry or any of the other careers that are being disrupted by the web brings to mind.
Feeling guilty about using a contest service for your graphics work is like feeling guilty if you don’t buy a phone from the sales rep at Best Buy. Entitlement days are over. Graphics designers, writers, programmers…we’re moving to a world where people are compensated based – not on effort – but on outcome. I think it’s brilliant. You’re spot on. 99Designs is a great idea, and I bet there are lots of designers there who do really well; but only the best. And that makes sense. Good for you.
Hey Alice, great analogy. While I wouldn’t want to take advantage of anyone, designers know what they are signing up for before they submit designs. There is no guarantee they will be chosen as winners. It’s an efficient marketplace that drives quality results.
That said, in the interest of helping web designers, I’d love to see some sort of retainer fee put in place for the top artists (paid by 99designs) to encourage them to remain on the site and submit many different designs for all job proposals rather than being completely independent contractors that may not want to stay on the site once they’ve developed a strong portfolio.
What kind of logo is that? And, what’s up with the ultra long phrase beneath your business name there? No offence, it looks like a twisted & crunched lollipop than a beneficial service logo.
To be honest. You can get far more better (meaning: objectively communicative to your targeted audiences) logo than that, with the same budget. That, if you do willing to communicate to any designers near you.
Just tell them your business level, income level, market size, etc. Most designers are not idiots, albeit some are, and they do know how to charge in contextual situation.
Dedicated designers do care about your business communication, that’s why they want to know further about it. They want to create it, as if it’s for their own business. Not just slapping you with colorful images & get away with your money.
Of course, you can’t just say: “hey.. I gotta $300 for a logo, can you do that? Fast? It’s easy, right?” to dedicated (not necessarily World Class) designers. They’ll get offended for sure, and thinking:
“What is this.. are you a drug dealer chased by police, and trying to start a new life on the run? $300, sure.. acceptable. But 100+ options? What a greedy & noneffective person..”
Problem with people today is. They want to build a business, with a sort of american dreams in it, but skip the ethical & process details. We lost our respect to others (professions or person value) but keep telling ourselves: “Oh yeah.. this is better than yesterdays! Easier!”
Flash news.. global economic is crumbling down, and it ain’t going to end up soon. Our “excessive profit hunting” mentality (treat others nor being treated like a disposable commodity) is the cause of it. Nobody is going to be rich anymore, since we are all educated & forced to believe those “1%” capitalists lifestyle & paradigm is good for everybody.
Tell me, whatever your business/profession is, do you want to do your work for free? Of course, no way. Secondly, do you work comfortable if a non dedicated person tells you how to do your job correctly (i.e being told to be a good blogger/SEO master by a “start-up” house cake maker).. again, no way.
Of course, those designers are not literally forced to submit their talents, but they are systematically forced to do so. Who are we fooling here? Oh man, what a nasty & selfish human being we all became.
@ Alice Errett: With the way you are thinking, I believe less people (if not none) are willing to related with you in any professional terms. Remember, you reap what you sow. Karma is a an awful debt collector, trust me.
Good luck with that logo, though. Although.. man, that “logo” is the most expensive $300 stuff ever! Phew.
PS:
Sorry for the long rant.
I don’t believe in ‘ready made logos’ or logos done with some swoooshes here and there that doesn’t make a single sense (like the sooverdebt logo), but hay you get what you pay for. (it’sa $300 may or may not have money. So it’s a designer’s right to may or may not spend time or creativity on it. )
I’m a freelance designer with a solid client list that goes beyond 9 years, and I sometimes take part in webdesign contests (I get my daily work mainly through steady clients and my website. I do get board every now and then tough. Design contests are a nice way to spice things up).
That being said I must say that your blog’s banner ‘IS ABSOLUTELY MISLEADING’. In a 99design contest, you cannot keep your legs up and relax while the other’s do it for yourself. If it’s a design contest you actually work more than you would with a single designer. 99design has a way that automatically locks the contest if the contest holder became less responsive. More designer’s you have taking part in your contest, more work you have. Sometimes it’s easy since only 1 or 2 quality designers take part. But if you do not have ‘good taste’, you are certainly doomed.
Plus, unlike in a committed client-designer relationship, contest participants have a more say on weather or not to attend to your requests. They drive the contest as much as the contest holder, sometimes more. If the participants realized the contest holder is not responsive, or not serious, do not have respect, or the prize isn’t worth the work, they will drop your contest like a hot potato. Just like there are many contestants, There is so many contests to choose from.
A contestant has the rights to the design until it’s been selected as the winer and can withdraw anytime. You can be easily sued if you used a participant’s design without permission (since everything is up on 99design, it’s easy proof.)
It’s always a good call to offer more what it would cost you as a 1 on 1 project, as the contest prize. That’s how good designers get interested in a contest.
I disagree with ‘my oh my’ on many levels too. I do not see anything wrong with students and part timers or newcomers or anyone who like to take part taking part in design contests. That’s a great way to boost their careers and become better. In fact I encourage students to take part in contests as much as possible. They may not win, may not even get to a final round, but the gain is that they are competing in the real world, doing real projects even before they graduate.
I think that ‘we were here first’ type of attitude (As in previous commenter – My oh My – ) isn’t going to get anyone anywhere. I’ve been working for clients like Bank of A******, Macy** etc; since 2004 and I’m still up for a challenge as the day 1. Just Way more prepared and experienced. If you do not prepare yourself to face the new tallant and new technology that keeps on happening, you will be left behind. For me, the challenge is one of the factors what makes my job more fun.