The Logo Factor Design Blog » Around the web

Yet another logo design review site

Steve Douglas — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 15:24:04 +0000

Speaking of logo design marketing, as competition in the logo design contest and crowdsourcing niche heats up, I suppose it was inevitable that (wink, wink) review sites were almost guaranteed to start popping up. As I’ve always maintained, most of these so-called impartial review sites (wink, wink) are put up by one of the companies that are (wink, wink) being reviewed, in order to bolster their bonafides, because no-one is willing to invest the time, or expense, into reviewing logo design sites if they don’t have a dog in the hunt.

Now, I’m not saying that Logo Contest Review is such a site, but it does take a rather favorable view of logo contest sites Logo Design Guru and Mycroburst, comparing both overwhelmly favorably to other platforms like Crowdspring, 99designs, Choosa, 48 Hour Logo, Logo Tournament, Design Contest, Design Crowd, Hatchwise, Logo My Way et al. Not much in the way of action, but (only) a couple of helpful comments, both trumpeting the benefits of Mycroburst over competitors 99designs and Crowdspring.

The only comparison that’s missing is Logo Design Guru vs. Mycroburst, probably because they’re, ahem, ‘powered’ by same flippin’ company.

Et tu Adobe?

Steve Douglas — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 13:42:34 +0000

Design software giant Adobe holds a logo design contest

Can’t imagine this going over too well with the creative set – a logo design contest being run by Adobe Creative Juices, a Facebook community ‘powered by Adobe’ aimed at a UK and Irish creative community. Designers are being asked to design the new Creative Juices logo (using expensive Adobe software no doubt) with the winning entry receiving an Adobe CS5 product and a promise of being “seen everywhere.” Internet freak-out in 3…2…1…

Hat tip: ID Apostle

German design students’ anti-spec-work video

Steve Douglas — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 10:58:08 +0000

As part of a spec work awareness program, Yasmin Kercher and other design students at the Augsburg University of Applied Sciences have created this video that illustrates some students’ position on spec wok, design contests and crowdsourcing. Their premise is simple – by working on spec, designers are slapping other designers in the face. Judging by some of the reactions in the video, the slaps are very real. (Hat Tip: No!Spec)

Speaking about spec work, another crowdsourcing site has launched, and like the legions before it, promises to turn the graphic design industry on its ear. One small difference with these Logo Vendor cats though. They’re charging designers to work for free. Yep. According to their FAQ –

There is a small fee for Designers on a per project basis. The fee is small in comparison to the access of thousands of Buyers and Designers, easy facilitation of fund transfer, and protection of Copyright materials.

Guess it was only a matter of time before someone pulled this stunt. Cue clown graphic:

Google logo features Islamic Crescent? Ahm, no.

Steve Douglas — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 03:48:49 +0000

Conservatives find another example of the hidden Muslim agenda. This time it’s in the Google Veteran’s Day logo. Sadly, we’re not kidding

First, they found an Islamic Crescent in the new Missile Command logo. Then they found another one in the logo for the Nuclear Security Summit. This time it’s the Google logo featured on the search engine’s home page to commemorate Veteran’s Day (above).

A freak out on Twitter ensued, as did this chastizing by a supposedly ‘serious’ technology blogger over at Yahoo’s Associated Content

Way to go, Google. Give crazies such as Pamela Geller, Terry Jones and Tea Party patriots the fuel they need to wage an all-out slugfest of vitriol against Islam for ruining an American tradition. The Google doodle is distasteful at best, hateful at worst, for this Veterans Day. Your Google doodle is supposed to enlighten and educate those who click on it, not cause a rift between two world powers.

Let me break this down. Google runs different versions of their logo on special events and holidays. This one features an American flag (quite appropriate for Veteran’s Day). The positioning of the flagpole is to make up the letter ‘L” in Google. Because of that, the flag is covering up part of the ‘E’ in Google, the remainder of which is poking out at the bottom.

Glad I could clear that up.

[Hat Tip: Gawker Illustration courtesy: Plognark]

The risks of creative crowdsourcing

Steve Douglas — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 10:22:52 +0000

Yet another boat logo. Yet another winning entry. And yet another graphic illustration of the risks of creative crowdsourcing for design buyers

Long time readers of the blog will be familiar with our damn boat logo. If not, let me bullet point. Many years ago, we designed a logo for an outfit called Euro Yacht and that logo has been featured on our website in one form or another since 2004. Been around long enough to get to number one in a Google search for ‘boat logo’. Because of that simple fact, this logo keeps getting knocked off and entered into logo design contests that are even tangentially related to boats. A marine repair shop. A boat rental shop. You get the drill. It’s not one contest. Or two. Or even three. It’s almost every single boat themed logo contest going. It wins too. A boat logo knock-off won on 99designs a few months ago. Well, it’s won again. This time on a contest being run on Crowdspring. Even got awarded five out of five stars by the contest holder (I guess that’s cool). Let’s do the exercise:

To Crowdspring’s credit, the winning entry was unawarded PDQ, and the ‘banning process started’ within fifteen minutes of me informing co-founder Mike Samson via Twitter:

That’s all fine and dandy I suppose, but what about the entries that I, and others, miss? I think it’s safe to say that this is not an isolated incident. And I think it’s safe to say that it’s not just this silly little logo either. Some poor sap holds a $600 logo design contest in good faith, picks the logo that they like, only to find they can’t have it, because it belongs to someone else. That’s cause some twerp entering the contest feels perfectly entitled to knock-off someone else’s work, repurpose it (while claiming in their entry submission that they created it) for a chance to win the $600 prize (if that wasn’t enough schadenfreude for ya, they’re pinching the logo from a page that outlines how people are pinching the logo). Almost won it too, if it wasn’t for the sheer luck that was involved in us finding out before too much damage was done.

Footnote:

Turns out there’s a new wrinkle to our boat logo story – seems we still own the copyright to the little boat (long story) so whenever someone cribs the logo, they’re actually pinching from us. The logo’s value for exclusivity has been bastardized all to hell, so here’s what we’re gonna do – offer up stock art type licensing rights for our boat logo at $99 per use. Want to enter our little boat logo in a contest? No problemo. Cough up 99 bones. And if the logo shows up in a hosted design contest, we’re going to send a bill for the licensing fee to the site hosting the contest because they’re claiming a license to display the work ‘in perpetuity’ as part of their terms and conditions. Any dough that we do manage to collect with be donated to charity (I’m thinking Doctors without Borders – one of my personal causes) so if our new licensees don’t pay up, they’ll be taking money away from a very worthwhile organization. And that’s Bad-Karma-Ville.

I’m kidding, right?

Actually no. No, I’m not.

Same circus. Different clown.

Steve Douglas — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 18:59:07 +0000

Yet another day. Yet another crowdsourcing site

Like everyone before them, Hiretheworld.com boast that they’re “turning the graphic design world on its ear”. At least according to their glowing profile in The Vancouver Sun.

“In essence, a company looking for something as simple as a logo, or a full-blown image makeover including a website, banner ads, stationery and business cards, goes to the hiretheworld.com website and fills out a brief form describing what it’s looking for, and what it proposes to pay for the work.

Freelance graphic designers, cast across five continents, look the request over, decide if they’ll bid and submit designs. The company looks over all the designs, picks the one it wants, pays for it and owns it outright. No need to go back to the original designer if you want tweaks or additional content — unless you want to.

The company describes the competition as a “design tournament.” It’s not so much outsourcing the work as crowd-sourcing it.”

Where we heard this before? Oh, I dunno. How about from every crowdsourcing site that’s come down the pike in the past few years. Cats need some different talking points.

And while we’re at it, cue clown graphic.

Speaking of spec work and crowdsourcing, Time magazine has now chimed in on the ‘stealth spec work’ campaign swirling around the new Gap logo debacle. Worth a read if you’re into such things.

3,216,000 hours

Steve Douglas — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 13:35:43 +0000

That’s the amount of unpaid designer time donated by spec work designers to Crowdspring, according to their own statistics. That’s right. Three million, two hundred and sixteen thousand hours.

Chicago based Crowdspring sure are big on numbers, statistics and pie charts. In a new blog post entitled Community creative – how we contribute, co-founder Mike Samson reveals some pretty interesting numbers about the Crowdspring community and their spec work participation on the site. While I suppose the Crowdspring lads think the figures are impressive, I find them utterly damning as to the futility of designers entering design contests, and routinely submitting their unpaid efforts to Crowdspring and similar sites. Let’s break ‘em down.

By the numbers

According to internal surveys conducted by Crowdspring, logo designers, web designers, print designers and illustrators spend 2.3, 3.2, 2.4 and 2.8 average hours per entry respectively. That works out to an average of 2.68 hours per entry.

On Crowdspring’s home page (at time of writing), they boast a total of 1,279,680 entries and 14,937 ‘successful’ projects to date. If we subtract those ‘successful projects’ from the total entries (winning entries were paid for) we’re left with 1,264,683 that weren’t. Now, we’re going to be generous and round down our unpaid entires to 1,200,000 – some contests offer multiple awards, winning designers probably entered more than one submission and writing contests aren’t included in the survey. We multiply that figure by the average number of hours spent on each entry and we end up with a figure of 3,216,000 man hours for which nobody received a thin red dime.

At $5 per hour (often used by pro-spec folks as an acceptable level of pay for designers in developing nations, where a lion’s share of participants come from) that works out to over $16 million worth of unpaid designer time.

At $10 an hour it works out to over $30 million.

At a decent North American wage of $20 per hour, we’re talking about $64 million of time that nobody paid a penny for.

Still think crowdsourcing isn’t exploitative?

Update:

In the interest of fairness, Crowdspring’s Mike Samson had this to say about this article (via Twitter)

Update 2:

If we work the numbers a little further, we can ascertain that each project on Crowdspring uses up approximately 230 man hours, on average, per project. Hardly a model of efficiency. If designers were getting paid for their work, and for a $200 logo job, that represents just over 86 cents per hour paid by the contest holder to Crowdspring.

$5 per logo? Alrighty then…

Steve Douglas — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 04:05:26 +0000

This was posted on The Logo Factory Facebook page photo wall, so I’m not sure what bidding site it was culled from, but here’s the short and skinny – someone “need(s) logo designers to design hundreds of logos for hundreds of different companies.” For a princely sum of five bucks a pop. As tempting as the offer is (snark), I have to wonder where all these lovely logos are headed? Probably to a logo design contest near you. And they say the graphic design industry isn’t in trouble.

Hat tip: Kevin Guiry

No related posts.

Forbes: Why designers hate crowdsourcing

Steve Douglas — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 13:12:57 +0000

Selective editing on a recent Forbes article on 99designs

Don’t suppose you read this article in Forbes about crowdsourcing and design contests, focused primarily on 99designs? A little more objective that the business magazine’s initial foray into the subject (when they opined that graphic design was a “snooty business“) but that’s not what makes it interesting. It’s the repeated editing that does.

When the article was first published, it contained this quote from 99designs founder Matt Mickiewicz “It doesn’t matter if you’re 15 or 60″ referring to the ‘come one, come all’ open nature of registering to be a designer on the site. Not sure how long the quote stayed intact, but certainly long enough to be captured by Google.

Shortly afterwards, the quote was changed to “It doesn’t matter if you’re 18 or 60,” perhaps when someone realized that 15 year old designers working for free wasn’t a terribly cool thing to be advocating, especially in a leading business publication. For those keeping score, that’s version 2.

Shortly after that, the articles was edited again, changing the minimum age back to 15, and adding a few points, most notably that “technically” someone has to be 18 to sign contracts, and that youngsters as young as eleven have posted designs into contests. That’s version 3.

At some point, the article was changed again, raising the minimum age to 18 again (but leaving the added disclaimers intact). That would be version 4, and the version that’s currently featured at the link above. Not sure what the big deal is – the quote has been used on numerous features about 99designs (including an article on Fast Company that’s proudly featured in the press section of 99designs’ own website).

So wonder why the repeated editing? Don’t suppose it has anything to do with this?

Nah.

Protecting your online copyrights

Steve Douglas — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 23:57:19 +0000

For designers, displaying images, logos and artwork on a website is a two-edged sword. In order to market design services it’s necessary to show work, but it also makes it easy for people to copy images with a simple right mouse click. Myows is a service that aims to change that by helping you protect your online copyrights, and getting material that has been copied, removed.

When it comes to displaying artwork on the internet, there are two types of designers. Those that have been knocked-off. And those that will be knocked-off. At The Logo Factory, we’ve had a running battle with copycats for years, with copied logos showing up everywhere from local pizzerias to logo design contest submissions and even on the television. Policing our work, and that of our clients, requires a healthy investment of time, effort and is, to be blunt, a pain in the ass. I only wish there was a service like Myows back in the day – it would have saved me a ton of e-mail bickering with would-be plagiarists.

My Own Works

Myows, shortened from ‘My Own Works‘ is the brainchild of Chris Human, Dave O’Reilly, Max Guedy and Steve Ferguson, brand strategist, web programmer, web designer and an IP attorney respectively, all of whom had grown tired of rampant content theft and believed that in the digital age there had to be a better way to register a copyright (other methods, the poor man’s copyright for example, don’t work). The group also worked closely with recognized online copyright expert, Plagiarism Today‘s Jonathan Bailey (we featured Jonathan’s trademark, copyright and logo design a couple of weeks ago). While trying to avoid sounding like an ad, here’s some of the tools that Myows makes available to users.

* Assists in securing the removal of unauthorized copy(s) of your work on- and off-line.
* Provides access to a growing pool of copyright-related knowledge and resources.
* Helps you keep track of permissions granted and active cases.
* Provides you with deterrence measures including custom warning graphics.
* Lets you store, view and manage your protected works in one place, online.
* Creates valuable evidence of your copyright.
* Presents the opportunity to become part of a global IP-savvy community.
* Proves the exact dates on which you uploaded your files, down to the minute.

If you want to see what others have said about Myows, take a gander at these reviews. If you’re a designer, photographer or a creative that has ‘exposed’ material online, I suggest that you give Myows a whirl. For the time being, it’s free (the company is planning pro accounts any day now). Interesting side note – the Myows logo was designed by the supremely talented Von Glitschka who was kind enough to send us the original sketch of the Myows logo character (below). You can check out more of Von’s work at his website.