I’ve been very impressed with an experiment my wife Charlene Li ran for her new company, Altimeter Group.
Charlene joined the ranks of entrepreneur after she left Forrester Research back in July and started her own research and advisory company. She is a thought leader on emerging technologies and co-author of Groundswell, Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.
Charlene needed a logo for her new company and being a small business and all had a limited budget to do so. Having been through many logo designs with my own startups, I know that this can be an expensive undertaking and rather inefficient process of back and forth.
She opted to use a service called CrowdSpring where you can post a creative project such as a logo, specify a price and get contributors from around the world to post their solutions for you to pick. It also has tools for providing feedback to the contributors and for them to respond, which makes for a very efficient process. Charlene also provided her brand positioning which helped shape the designs.
Charlene wrote about the experience on her blog and there was a lot of controversy about using this service/method for the work as can be seen from the rich commentary.
I’m a big fan of this service. Even though her price for the logo work was relatively low at $400, there will be a whole lot more work associated with the web site design, business cards, letterhead etc that will make it worthwhile for the designer. It’s an efficient way for designers to get projects to bid on and for immediate feedback so they don’t waste their time and you don’t waste yours. I also noticed that all designers had profiles and you could see examples of their portfolio and past awarded business on CrowdSpring. The really good ones picked up a lot of business. I’m all for the kind of competition this encourages and rewarding good work.
I was quite impressed with both the quantity and quality of options – in all, 146 options were submitted. You can see the results here:
Charlene believes she got such a rich response in part because she went through the effort to comment and provide feedback to each submission.
Her final selection :
I would highly recommend this service to any startup.
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Hey Côme,
Thanks so much for writing about crowdSPRING and for recommending us to others. We met Charlene earlier this year at the Under The Radar conference (she was a judge on a panel during our presentation). We were thrilled that Charlene gave the nearly 11,000 creatives working on crowdSPRING (from 130+ countries) the chance to help her with a logo for Altimeter Group. There were some great choices – the logo she chose is outstanding.
Charlene did an exceptional job with feedback and driving the brand positioning and as you wrote, that’s an important component to good logo design.
You are absolutely right that crowdSPRING is a stepping-stone for creatives. Even though we are only seven months old, some have already build successful design businesses as a result of follow-on work from crowdSPRING clients. We’re thrilled for them and also that a level playing field has opened the door for tens of thousands of creatives around the world who are looking only for the opportunity to compete fairly.
Best,
Ross Kimbarovsky
co-Founder
http://www.crowdspring.com
Hi,
I crowdsourced my logo design at http://www.shopfordesigns.com and I found the services to be very very satisfactory.
Many designers posted and I got what i wanted.
Also they didnt charge any contest listing fee for me. It was free…