Now that Gap has announced they’re abandoning their new logo, as well as passing on crowdsourcing for further development, perhaps we should take a look for lessons learned

After an Internet backlash about the new Gap logo late last week, the clothing retailer has now backed down, returning to their original mark, as well as nixing any plans to crowdsource a new design. According to company officials:

“We’ve learned a lot in this process. And we are clear that we did not go about this in the right way. We recognise that we missed the opportunity to engage with the online community. This wasn’t the right project at the right time for crowd sourcing. There may be a time to evolve our logo, but if and when that time comes, we’ll handle it in a different way.”

So, as designers, what can we learn? Several things I think. The first is this silly notion that ‘logos are dead.’ Obviously, logos still resonate with a large percentage of the market, consumers and customers. The second is that designers, when they work together, can exact change in their industry. Remember that when you want to gripe about ‘yet another spec work’ article. According to Ad Age, 80% of Gap customers surveyed, had no idea about the online controversy swirling about the ‘new’ Gap logo, so it’s a safe bet that a lot of the dust-up involved designers. It would therefore seem, despite all the spec work talking points, designers as a whole are still very much opposed to crowdsourcing and design contests.

Related posts:

1. AIGA softening positon on spec and design contests?
2. What logo design secrets can we learn from the top 100 brands?
3. SXSW ’09: Is spec work evil?

Gap unveils their new logo to an internet firestorm, Twitter battles between the new and old and a lot of griping amongst the design community. Take our poll after the jump.

Visitors to the Gap website this morning were greeted by a new logo (above right) and critics were quick to jump on the new design. Replacing the retail chain’s famous blue box, which enclosed all upper-case “Gap” typography in a condensed serif is a graduated blend blue box slid under a bold sans serif font. The change isn’t universal, and the original logo remains on all Gap stores (as far as I know anyway).

The Gap chain is made up of over 1,200 stores in North America, 300 in Europe and in various parts of Asia. Interbrand values the Gap brand at almost $4 billion, the 84th most-valuable brand in the world. The internet reaction to the new logo was rapid – critics have spent most of the day bagging the new logo, and a poll in a feature about the switch on the Huffington Post was almost 80% negative at time of writing. “Gap logo” is also the 69th most popular search phrase on Google.

Two related, and dueling, Twitter accounts have shown up in the past few hours – @gaplogo and @oldgaplogo – though whether the accounts are official, or parody, is anyone’s guess. There’s still some question about whether the change is permanent or not. The new logo was rolled out on the hush-hush – no official press releases issued and media calls for comment have not been returned. So waddya think – an improvement or not (poll below)?

I’m leaning heavily towards not.

Update:

According to a new post on the Gap Facebook page:

Thanks for everyone’s input on the new logo! We’ve had the same logo for 20+ years, and this is just one of the things we’re changing. We know this logo created a lot of buzz and we’re thrilled to see passionate debates unfolding! So much so we’re asking you to share your designs. We love our version, but we’d like to see other ideas. Stay tuned for details in the next few days on this crowd sourcing project.

Accordingly, I’ve added another choice to our poll below.

No related posts.

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2. Battle for hearts and minds continues
3. Belgian design agencies shutter websites in virtual ‘strike’ against spec work

When it comes to marketing stuff on the internet, many logo design companies have developed split personalities, pretending they’re someone else, located somewhere they’re not, and offering the exact same services for different pricing on different websites. A look at the fine art of logo design sock puppetry

When it comes to selecting a logo designer, you’re probably going to do what we all do when looking for anything these days. Search for one on the internet. Very cool. A link from somewhere else is probably how you found our site, and probably this very article. That’s how all this is supposed to work. We touched on the lengths some logo design firms will go to get you to their websites in our SEO for logo designers article a while back. To sum up that monster sized screed, the lengths are very far indeed. See, selling logo design services on the interwebs is a very competitive business. It’s also a fairly lucrative one, if, that is, you can get enough eyes on your website. Or in the case of logo design sock puppetry, enough eyes on all of their websites. Having a bunch of websites promoting one company ain’t a big deal. Everybody does it. It’s when a whole bunch of websites promote a whole bunch of different companies, that are really all the same company that things get kind of odd. And when you factor in the lengths that these companies go to hide those connections, you’ve gotta be just a little concerned.

Right now, there’s a load of people all over the world skim reading this article, looking for bold versions of their various aliases and websites. They can relax. I’m not going to name names, nor am I going to hold anyone up to scrutiny. That’s not the point of this article, though it would make a fascinating read for people who’re into such things. This is about clients, and why they should be concerned about hiring a sock puppet design firm to create their new company logo.

Online diplomas, student loans and term papers?

For some odd reason, a lot of folks from South East Asia who are flogging logo design services, are also heavily connected to dodgy online college diplomas. Prefab college term papers. Student loans. College affiliate revenue (usually through ‘Request Free College Information‘ sections of their websites). Not sure what the connection is, save stuff that can be sold completely via the internet without much in the way of oversight, or overhead. Such connections often have some comical results, especially when they use fake physical addresses to bolster their USA location bona fides. There’s a couple of sites, run by a huge IT company in Pakistan, that featured one such US address on their website. Trouble is, that address just happened to be an abandoned warehouse in Delaware (due to Delaware’s lax foreign corporation laws), and just happened to get shown on a CNN report about a fake diploma and University degree scandal that had blown up at the United Nations that resulted in some high-profile firings. The logo design sites changed the town listed on their website pretty damn fast, but the street address remains the same, rendering it moot.

Determining a sock puppet website

How to tell a sock puppet website? One such way is their phone number (if their site even bothers to list one in the first place). See, websites are cheap. Toll free numbers, through US based VOIP modem phones aren’t, so a search of phone numbers will generally reveal connections with other sites. Often to phone numbers that are connected to spammers, as these VOIP numbers are recycled between customers. Trouble is, sock puppet sites are getting wise to this one, and are now featuring .gif phone number images to which search engine spiders are blind. But that’s okay. Most companies want their phone numbers to be picked up by search engines, so if the website you’re perusing has turned their phone number into an image, ask yourself ‘why did they turn their phone number into an image?’ Because they don’t want you to connect their various sock puppet sites is why.

Google Earth and its companion Street View are pretty cool too, and there’s quite a few logo design websites whose addresses are either empty fields or free-standing buildings that have nothing to do with logo design. I asked one site via chat window about their address being that of a stand-alone jewelry store, and they told me “we’re in the back”. Trouble is, there is no back, and the people in the jewelry store had never heard of the company. Funny enough, the jeweler told me, I wasn’t the first to ask. There’s another outfit who claims they’re a US based company with a Karachi office. As their Pennsylvania office consists of a couple of desks, while all their production is done in their Karachi facility, I’d argue they’re a Pakistan based company with a US office (their recent foray into the logo design contest & ‘crowdsourcing arena is being heavily promoted by a network of graphic design blogs, aimed at designers, that all deny connections to each other. The amount of logo raiding that forms most of the content for these blogs is astonishing). But it isn’t where these companies are located is the issue. It’s where they tell you they’re located, and the extreme lengths they’ll go to lie about it. Right to your face. Just business you say? Not where I’m from. I thought transparency was the key. We’d get more business if we pretended we were based in the US. It’s up to us to convince clients that a Canadian-based design shop can create decent logos.

The importance of being earnest

Why is all this important? Here’s why. If the people behind a sock puppet logo website have no issue with lying to you about who they are and where they are, and what they’ve done, how does that square with their other website claims? When they say they’ll put five designers on your project will they really? Or will it be some poor solo Mac jockey, harried, overworked and underpaid, trying to keep up with a flood of website orders tossed on his workstation? When they say that all work is 100% custom, is it, or are you paying to look at designs that have been rejected from previous projects and assembled for your consideration because they sorta look like the stuff you asked for in your web brief? A frankensteined tinker-toy logo with your company name slapped across the bottom after thirty seconds of Adobe editing. And when they tell you about their unlimited revisions, are they really ‘unlimited’ (usually not) or do they pull the plug once your revision requests have taken your project into the non-profit area? See, buying stuff on on the internet is, to a great degree, based on trust. And if a company is willing to lie to you about such fundamentals as their own identity, the credibility of their entire pitch becomes suspect. It’s not often that folks who are lying to your face to get your money, will have an honesty epiphany when they get it.

Cute little button eyes though.

Related posts:

1. Designing logos is easy. At least according to ehow
2. 10 tips for designing an original logo
3. FAX Spam. Most Annoying Thing in the Universe?

Plagiarism Today’s Jonathan Bailey takes a look at trademark, copyright and how it applies to logos and logo design. Part of a series on understanding intellectual property rights and how to protect yours.

To hear intellectual property attorneys describe it, it seems so simple. Copyright covers creative works of expression fixed into a tangible medium of expression. Trademark covers business names, slogans and other items used to identify it in the marketplace. Patent covers ideas and inventions. Simple.

Then what about logos?

Logos are one of those spaces of intellectual property law where there is a great deal of overlap between two areas, in this case copyright and trademark, and businesses are known for using both to protect their logos from undesired use.

So where are the lines drawn? The answers aren’t very simple and requires looking deeper into what copyright and trademark protect and, even then, there aren’t very many clear answers to give, just a lot of gray area that has to be taken one case at a time.

Trademark and Logos

When most people think of intellectual property and logos, they leap to trademark and for good reason. Trademark is about protecting things that identify a business in the marketplace and logos are among the most important means of identification. As such, logos are generally protected by trademark and enforceable as such.

In many ways, trademark is much more broad than copyright. Where copyright doesn’t expand to things such as names, colors, typefaces, designs, etc. trademark does or at least can. However, trademark is also much more limited than copyright in that, where copyright is designed to protect against almost all unlicensed copying that is outside of fair use, trademark only deals with use of the mark that causes confusion in that company’s marketplace.

For example, Ace Hardware certainly has a trademark on their name, but they can’t stop Ace Bandages from also using the name as they are in separate markets (unless you are very careless when doing home repair). Likewise, Delta Airline and Delta Faucets share a trademark without incident and Apple Computers and Apple Music also shared a mark without major conflict (beyond a scuffle in 1989), that is until Apple entered the music business with iTunes.

All in all, logos, by their very nature, are used to identify businesses and groups and though trademark protection covers many additional things, it offers a much more narrow scope of protection. In short, trademark is designed not to prevent copying, but confusion in the marketplace, thus severely limiting what uses of the logo can be considered infringing.

Copyright and Logos

In order for a work to have copyright protection, it must reach a requisite level of creativity. Many logos, however, do not. Since copyright can’t protect a name, colors or the design of the logo, most simple logos simply do not have the required level of creativity to be considered copyrightable. However, many ornate or artistic ones do.

And here lies the confusion with logos. Many of them actually qualify for both trademark and copyright protection. In fact, the entire Omega v. CostCo case hinges in part upon a logo stamped onto a watch being copyright protected (thus making the import of the watch a violation of the copyright).

In short though, if a logo would qualify for copyright protection as a piece of artwork separate from its use as a corporate identifier, it is copyright protected. Nothing in the law makes the two rights mutually exclusive so many logos can and are enforced using both trademark and copyright.

Which Protection to Use/Fear

This means that, if you design a logo for yourself or your business, you actually may, if the logo qualifies, have two forms of intellectual property protection on it. Trademark to prevent competitors and others from using it to cause confusion in the marketplace and copyright to prevent most other unwanted copying.

Which protection to rely is a case-by-case question depending on the actual use that you are trying to stop.

Trademark is, in many regards, easier to defend and protect than copyright, especially since there is no registration requirement in the U.S. to obtain a mark or sue for trademark infringement (though there are still many crucial benefits to registration). That being said, there is also no notice-and-takedown system for trademarks and lawsuits or other trademark actions, such as domain name disputes, can be very expensive.

Trademark’s narrow scope limits the situations it can be used to cases where the use is misleading or confusing customers. Where copyright covers nearly all unauthorized copying that is not a fair use, trademark only applies to a small fraction of all potential uses.

When using an artistic logo, there are now two areas of law to be aware of. Trademark is fairly easy to avoid, at least when using logos, as all you have to do is not pretend to have a relationship with the company that doesn’t exist.

However, with copyright issues of fair use begin to rise. In that regard, treat an artistic logo the same as you would any other photograph or painting and don’t make any use of it that you wouldn’t if it weren’t a logo. Using it with permission is best (many companies will actually provide logos for use on blogs and news sites) but barring that focusing on commentary and criticism while using as little of the work as possible helps stack the fair use case in your favor.

The good news, however, is that most blogs won’t really run into an issue, copyright or otherwise, with their use of logos. Fan sites and sites dedicated to a specific company or product need to be careful, but since most logos aren’t copyright protected and the majority of use of logos in a blog environment are a probable fair use regardless, the odds of actual trouble are very slow. You are much more likely to have a copyright dispute over a stock photo that you place in your blog than a logo.

That, in turn, is why I use logos a great deal on this site when talking about companies. It’s an easy way to add relevant visuals to an article without trademark or copyright concerns.

Bottom Line

In the end, logos are a strange area of intellectual property law where copyright and trademark often meet and overlap. However, just because many logos, though not nearly all, have dual protection between copyright and trademark, that does not mean that businesses and others with logos can stop all uses of them. Trademark’s limited scope doesn’t really add that much protection beyond the additional things it covers, namely non-copyrightable elements.

In short, while this area of the law can be very confusing, especially when faced with an unwanted use of your logo or a desire to use a logo, if it even qualifies for copyright protection, there really isn’t much need to treat it different than any other image.

Still, those who use logos or create them need to be aware of all the potential rights involved, both so they can steer clear of trouble and so they can enforce them correctly.

Jonathan Bailey is a copyright and plagiarism consultant and the CEO of CopyByte, a consulting firm specializing in copyright on the web. You can also find him at his blog Plagiarism Today, a site dedicated to helping content creators protect their work, and stomping around the New Orleans area looking for geocaches. You can catch Johnathan this weekend at Open Camp in Addison, Texas. This article was republished with permission.

You can obtain an online copyright registration in 3 easy steps. See our design partners section for more.

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As evidenced by features on NPR and in Forbes, spec work, crowdsourcing and design contests remain the darlings of the business media. Sadly, many of the inflated claims made are left unchallenged and become the accepted truth, when often times, they’re not really true at all.

Conversations about spec work and crowdsourcing have turned up in a few media places the last few days, so figured we might as well take a look at what’s what, and offer up our usually dissenting two cents worth. The first was an NPR interview with Crowdspring co-founder Mike Samson, hosted by Bob Garfield as part of his On The Media show. You can listen at the link (also includes a transcript). Nothing terribly earth-shattering, more of a typical puff-piece and glorified press release for Crowdspring. Trouble is, many claims made on the show, some of them quite debatable, are left unchallenged, so thought it might be worthwhile if we took the liberty of, well, challenging them. Fly in the ointment and all that. Don’t want to seem like I’m bagging on Samson, but this sort of stuff happens when the media conflates the issue of crowdsourcing and design contests, with the companies that host them. Having got all that out of the way, let’s begin with the rationale for the show:

BOB GARFIELD: When I wrote my most recent book about the chaos created by the digital revolution, I, of course, needed a cover. In the spirit of my subject matter, I crowdsourced the project through an online site called crowdSPRING.com. More than a hundred designers from around the world took on the project, and the winner got 500 dollars, plus the glory of illustrating The Chaos Scenario.

Glory of illustrating The Chaos Scenario you say? Some glory. When the author of the book hosts a radio show that extols the virtue of crowdsourcing and Crowdspring, and talks about the book cover project itself, he neglects to mention the designer’s name? For the record, the winner of Garfield’s book cover is a designer who no longer participates in Crowdspring contests, but now works for the company as one supposes, a salaried employee. Make of that what you wish.

BOB GARFIELD: Now, digital tools have made your business something like an inevitability, just like the steam engine made mass production of, say, shoes an inevitability. But the Industrial Revolution also spelled very [LAUGHS] bad news for cobblers, the shoemakers who were basically priced out of the market.

MIKE SAMSON: When shoes could be mass produced, all of a sudden many, many, many more people had access to high-quality footwear, and the quality of their life was improved. CrowdSPRING, and platforms like crowdSPRING, provide the same function in a more modest way for the consumers, the buyers of creative services.

The comparison between crowdsourcing and design contests as some sort of Industrial Revolution level event is, to be honest, a load of bollocks. The invention of the printing press, the weaving loom, compugraphic typesetting machines (and in the case of this example. shoe manufacturing assembly lines I guess) represented a bellwether change in the technology of the production system. What once took forty people to do, only took a few operators to accomplish. Or what took a skilled artisan to do, could now be completed by loosely trained, unskilled workers. None of that has occurred in crowdsourcing or logo design contests. Designers still use the same tools and technology. They still have to be fairly skilled and/or talented to cobble (pun intended) together a decent logo design or website. The only thing that’s changed is that rather than getting paid for their cobbling (yep, intented again) they’re not. All crowdsourcing and design contest sites are merely gussied up CMS forums. The method of production, the design process itself, remains largely unchanged and spec designers still put on their Illustrator one leg at a time.

Further, any of the bellwether changes mentioned represented the down-sizing of the work force that was needed to accomplish the exact same task, a ruthless application of capitalist efficiency. Crowdsourcing is actually the complete opposite of that. Hundreds of ‘designers’ now participate, rather than an individual designer or a small sized team. Up-sizing I guess. Crowdsourcing is not like the ‘industrial revolution’ for design but the industrial revolution in reverse. Whereas the industrial revolution increased efficiency, and reduced waste, crowdsourcing and design contests decrease efficiency and increase waste by enormous factors. See, if we insist on using these silly industrial revolution metaphors (I’ve been called a Luddite for opposing unpaid labor from designers), let’s get it right. The ‘steam engine’ event for designers was the advent of desktop publishing software and reasonably priced desktop PCs. That, for anyone keeping score, started happening in the 1990s. The second was the traction of the internet, which allowed designers to market themselves to clients outside their home town, using the same tools and technology as the so-called ‘gatekeepers’ and established majors that we keep hearing about. Those two events ‘leveled the playing field’ long before Crowdspring opened their doors, and are still available for many designers now participating in spec work dog-and-pony shows. They’d be much better if they did, too.

SAMSON: That buyer who comes to crowdSPRING with a 500-dollar book cover project or a 300-dollar logo project couldn’t afford the fee that a traditional designer charges, so their options before a platform like crowdSPRING were very limited.

This chestnut, a very close relative of the $5,000 logo’, is simply not true. Before ‘platforms like Crowdspring’ came along, there were loads of choices and options already available. There still are. Outfits like Crowdspring have to convince the market that so-called ‘traditional’ designers charge far more for design work than they actually do. Besides, and if we wanted to be snarky (not I), and take Samson at face value, before Crowdspring came along, there was always 99designs, where Crowdspring cobbled (never gets old) their business model from.

BOB GARFIELD: But there’s a second question, Mike, and that’s an ethical question concerning the new labor force. When they participate in crowdSPRING, when they bid on my book cover or somebody else’s logo or a webpage design or what have you, 100 or more entries for each project come in. One winner. The winner gets paid poorly, according to the professional scale, and the others get paid not one red cent. Can you explain to me why this isn’t exploitation?

MIKE SAMSON: All of the work that was created for your project, except for that one winning entry, remained the property of the person who created it. They can resell that, they can use it as a template, they can use it in their marketing materials.

I may be a Luddite (snooty too), but I’ve never understood how hundreds of designers working on someone’s project without pay can’t be considered exploitation. But, for the purposes of this discussion, let’s take Samson’s main argument against designer exploitation, that they maintain property rights to their work, at face value. Swell. A hundred designers with an unused book cover design for ‘The Chaos Scenario.” All peachy I suppose, when someone else publishes another book by that title ’cause I’m sure they’ll be just thrilled to buy one of these ‘custom’ designs, the fact that they’re second-hand and recycled notwithstanding. Having said all that, I’m still not sure how this negates the ‘exploitation’ criticism.

SAMSON: We give them the opportunity to create.

More than a little bit of hubris there. Before Crowdspring came along, no-one could ‘create’? Hardly. People could always create. Crowdsourcing sites have only given designers, most of them painfully unaware of the realities of these platforms, the opportunity to submit their creations, to free-for-all contests, while the site charges contest holders a non-refundable listing fee for the privilege of ‘leveraging’ all this lovely free talent. Nothing more. Nothing less. Actually, with the lack of protections in place for participating designers, often a lot less.

BOB GARFIELD: Okay, schnooks like me have used crowdSPRING, and I guess a lot of mom and pops, but others who are not mom and pops have also used platforms like yours. I’m talking about Random House, Barilla Pasta, Epic Records, the metal band Judas Priest. Doesn’t that kind of confirm the worst fears of the established design community?

MIKE SAMSON: Well, yes and no. Big companies do come in and post their project with us. Now, the reason they do so isn’t just to get the artwork or the written content. They’re trying to learn how they can leverage this platform and this process to engage audiences. Judas Priest, frankly, they’ve got plenty of designers who could have designed that tour poster for them. Epic Records has lots of designers on staff who do this every day. But what you can’t do with an in-house design department is you can’t engage the fan base in a way that makes them want to buy merchandise and want to be associated with the band. So when Epic Records posted that project for Judas Priest, they put the word out to the fan clubs and the fan sites, and the fans flocked in to participate.

We touched on this in our Crowdspecking article a while back. This all boils down to intent. When major companies employ design contests, they’re generally of the ‘fire-and-forget’ variety. As Samson correctly points out, large companies have lots of designers on staff, but they use contests to engage their fan base. Getting cheap design stuff isn’t even part of the equation, and participants enter because of their love of the product, service or in this case, rock band. Even then, a major risk of crowdsourcing – plagiarized entries – can raise its ugly head (witness the Cadbury Chocolate label contest, where the winning entry turned out to be knocked off). See, conflating this kind of ‘social media marketing’ with spec work and crowdsourcing (where designers complete projects through revision steps, and even when selected as winner, and awarded the vaunted prize, aren’t finished complying with contest holder revision requests) is to be charitable, apples and oranges. Crowdsourcing, in its current incarnation, is marketed to small business as getting lots of stuff cheap. And I’m left wondering if those Judas Priest fans are still counted as part of Crowdspring’s ‘community’ numbers, cause I got a nickels to donut bet that sez they ain’t hanging around to design pet food logos on Crowdspring.

BOB GARFIELD: You know, it’s funny how a person’s reactions can be different based on whose ox is being gored. What were vague ethical qualms I had when doing my book cover suddenly have me in a full-blown panic, because I can see very clearly that the amount of money that I can fetch for the kind of writing I do, just by virtue of the law of supply and demand, has to go down.

So ethic ‘qualms’ about exploiting the unpaid efforts of others only raises its inconvenient head when it applies to Garfield’s own industry, namely writing? That’s swell, though to be fair, a hat tip to Bob for realizing it. This argument has been used by designers for years now (“As an [insert profession here] would you do work on spec? No? Then why would you expect designers to?”). Trouble is, designers are guilty of the same kind of ethical hypocrisy, largely ignoring the pleas of photographers a few years back, when micro-stock services hammered the professional photography industry. Alas, it’s an easy trap to fall into.

BOB GARFIELD: Them’s pretty words, Mike Samson. They have not, however, been all that soothing to the people on what is called the “no-spec movement,” a group of design schools and businesses and individuals who themselves refuse to produce work on spec and are trying to rally the rest of the crowd to follow the same ground rules. Are they a threat to you?

MIKE SAMSON: No, we don’t think so. We have a community of about 64,000 designers and writers. About 50 percent of those are U.S. based. The membership of the AIGA, which is the leading professional organization of graphic designers in the United States, has a membership that’s a fraction of that size. And that’s nothing against the AIGA as a professional organization, but what it says is there is a need and a hunger out there.

Ah, the numbers game. But hey, if we’re going to throw around stats and percentages, let’s take a look at all the numbers. And all the percentages. See, here’s the thing – as we detailed here, the vast majority of people who sign up for sites like Crowdspring do so without ever entering a single contest. Not a single one. See, it’s free. And you have to sign up to view the ‘community’ forums. At present there are 65,000 ‘creatives’ claimed, yet according to their own stats, over 30,000 registrants have never entered a single ‘project’. Nor, judging by their ‘last seen date’ will they ever. The number of ‘creatives’ that have entered 1, 2 or three contests is similarly in the tens of thousands (Judas Priest fans I guess). The vast majority of designers that do register as participants bail shortly after, so It’s safe to say that most spec and crowdsourcing sites are supported by a fraction of the numbers claimed. The numbers trotted out equal registrants and people who’ve clicked a check box that states they’ll act as ‘creatives’ on the site. For the record (and while I’ve never been a big fan of AIGA or a big believer in trotting out statistics for the reasons I just illustrated) the AIGA claims 22,000 members. Those are paid-up, participating members by the way, so Crowdspring’s ‘our dick is bigger than their dick’ claim is a tad silly. And doesn’t really mean jack.

BOB GARFIELD: Their claim is that not only does a user of spec material prey on an exploited class of labor, it also generates inferior results. However, the Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics. Do you have to be a professional designer to create professional designs?

MIKE SAMSON: No, you don’t, frankly. The Nike logo was produced by a student who reportedly received about 20 dollars in payment. I understand she did get some Nike stock which paid off over time. But I think that history is rife with examples like those of, quote, unquote, “amateurs” producing phenomenal work.

You would think that after trotting the Nike logo chestnut out for the umpteenth time, Mike would at least start getting the story right. The Nike Swoosh logo was created in 1971 by graphic design student Carolyn Davidson, who was hired for the job and billed $35.00, based on a rate of $2.00 per hour (around minimum wage at the time – I was making $2.35 an hour for my first job five years later, the result of mandated minimum wage increases). Using this price tag, from the seventies, to somehow justify design contests in 2010, is an often employed tactic, though ludicrous at first blush. And as Samson points out, Davidson did get more of a payday from the athletic company in 1983 when Nike gave Davidson a gold Swoosh gold ring and an envelope filled with an undisclosed amount of Nike stock to express their gratitude. See Mike, it’s not about ‘amateur’ vs. ‘professional’. It’s not even about whether work designed through crowdsourcing is ‘inferior’ or not (that’s another argument entirely, but directly tied into my next sentence). It’s about paying people for their work.

Up to now, a fairly basic principle in supposedly civilized societies.

Related posts:

1. Snippets: Crowdspring to offer spec writing, NEA holds a spec work contest & other news
2. SXSW “Is Spec Work Evil?” panel transcript
3. Defending crowdsourcing & design contests. The platitudes of spec work.

Want to rank on Google for ‘logo design’ or related keywords? Due to shady tactics of some of the front runners, your odds are long. That doesn’t mean you’re completely out of luck. How using a ‘rising tide lifts all boats’ philosophy, we can all improve our site rankings.

SEO abuse of the logo design niche in most search engines has been a pet peeve for years now. Alas, Google and other search engines appear to be fighting a losing battle when it comes to enforcing their own webmaster guidelines, something that’s not terribly surprising, especially when we consider what they’re up against. With the cost of launching a website dropping every week, and the competition of all keyword niches heating up everywhere, it’s an overwhelming tide as websites tussel for a bit of the search engine ranking pie. Or, as is the case with some firms, all the search engine ranking pie. With the publication of several recent articles on major design blogs – David Airey‘s The folly of logo design SEO and Duane Kinsey‘s Google doesn’t understand professional logo design – seems a lot of designers are starting to notice that all is not right in search engine land. And they’re right. It isn’t. Probably time we had an in-depth look at what’s what, but I have to warn you that the following is long, grueling and in places, a little dry. It might be worth a read though, if you’re sincere in your desire to market design on the internet. Ready? Let’s get started…

It’s all about the link love

Used to be that a large chunk of any rankings success came from on page optimization. Title, description and keyword Meta tags under the hood. Combined with any way possible to stuff a keyword onto a page. ALT tags, hidden footer text. No longer. Those will get your site penalized by search engines, if not booted out of the index entirely. And while page titles and description tags are still important to ranking any website page, most of the search engines ignore the ‘keywords’ tag entirely. I only add keywords to a page for our site search field, not for any SEO performance. And rather than stuffing the phrase logo design into a post or article with merry abandon, I now edit a lot of instances out. See, even though I try to write naturally, just like the search engines tell me to, I use the phrase a lot because that’s what I’m generally blathering on about. And even though I could have used the phrase logo design about six times in those past couple of sentences, I didn’t. The point of the matter is that most SEO optimization now takes place off page. On other websites that link to your site. That’s viewed by search engines as a ‘vote of confidence‘ and factored highly into where your page shows up for your relevant keyword search. (It’s a little more complicated than that, but outlining that is a book not a blog post).

Anchor text is where it’s at

The other part of that equation is what’s known as ‘anchor text‘ – the text used in the actual link. Concise and to the point is the key. If someone links to an article on your blog about ‘fish ponds’, using the anchor text ‘fish ponds’, then Google will see your page as being pretty relevant to the search phrase ‘fish ponds’. Add to this topical page title and description tags and you’ll probably show up when someone is searching for ‘fish ponds’. Have a lot of people linking to your page using those criteria and you’ll show up pretty high on Google, Yahoo! and Bing. It’s pretty basic, yet completely logical stuff. How important are inbound or back links? Well, according to a 2009 SEO Expert survey, “keyword focused anchor text from external links” is the single most important factor when it comes to search engine rankings.

“I’ve often said that there’s more than enough business for designers to go around. It’s only when folks decide to ‘own’ a certain market, do the SEO shenanigans begin. Anyone that knows about James Bond’s baddie organization SPECTRE will realize that whenever global domination becomes the goal, ethics go out the window.”

‘Do follow’ and ‘No follow’

Should come as no surprise then that this is also where most of the shady SEO tactics are employed, as people find more creative and arguably devious ways to get a whole bunch of links pointing to this site or that. Before blogs came along, it used to be guest books that were the tactic of choice. As blogs increased in popularity, comment sections became the fave target of link spammers, and something which any blog publisher still combats on a daily basis, even though the advent of ‘no follow’ relationship (rel) tags back in 2005 neutered most of the SEO benefits. The ‘no follow‘ tag tells search engine spiders not to follow the link or transfer any page rank to the target page, and while there’s some evidence that its success isn’t 100%, its obvious that a ‘do follow‘ link is far more valuable than a ‘no follow’ one (‘no follow’ and ‘do follow’ links will become more relevant to our discussion in a bit). Google has recently taken a grim view of paid links and reviews, expecting them to be gussied up with ‘no follow’ links, though most folks aren’t bothering (that would negate the benefit of selling links and reviews in the first place). Alas, this is impossible to police, and Google has resorted to paid link snitch forms, though with the volume of one competitor ratting out another, such efforts have remained uneffective. Not just Google either. The FTC, seeing how paid links and reviews end up skewing supposedly unbiased reviews, are now demanding that bloggers reveal that they’re getting paid for such tenuous endorsements. That probably won’t work either. And if anything, such tactics are going to increase, not decline.

The wars rage on

Marketing design services, particularly anything specializing in logos, has become an increasingly cut-throat business. There’s not much the people behind logo design sites won’t do to increase their position in search engines through gaming this link love formula. Nothing. We’ve seen the rise of splogs (that’s worth a read for the update). There isn’t a day goes by when some designer sees their latest work lifted and placed on another site, either by blog content scraping or logo raiding, both practices whose sole function is to artificially inflate a target site’s ranking in search results. Our blog went into exhaustive detail how some top performing logo sites are doing it, referring to logo wars almost two years ago. If anything, these search engine wars have heated up. Unfortunately, many designers think that it’s a matter of setting up a pretty WordPress blog, writing some great copy around some great logo examples and the world will be beating a path to your virtual door. Alas, it’s not that easy. Used to be. But it ain’t any more. There’s one hundred and seventy eight million reasons why.

Logo designers on Google

Take a look at the top ten results of Google when you type in the words logo and design into a search bar. Three are owned by HP and their design division Logo Works. Two are owned by Guru Corporation, the company behind Logo Design Guru (#3) and Logoblog.org (#7). Just ten spots and half of them are owned by two companies. Let’s go to page two. Two of those spots are owned by the same company (who also own dozens of the top 100 spots, disguising them as USA based sites, while the actual company can be found in Karachi, Pakistan). One is owned by the same company who owns two on the first page. And so on. Getting the picture? There ain’t much room in the top 50 spots for your new logo design site, let alone on the first page. Running a similar exercise for the main related keywords – corporate logos, business logos, et al – will yield similar results and will often serve up companies that dominate a multitude of keyword combinations. All good for them, I suppose. Big business. The trouble is there’s no way to dominate search engine categories without employing grey and black hat techniques. That, unfortunately, is how it is.

How ‘they’ do it

Many of the top ten sites ranking for ‘logo design’ on Google do so by setting up massive numbers of inbound links to their sites, through tactics that range from White Hat (cool in Google’s eye), Grey Hat (so-so) to completely and utterly Black Hat (not so much). I know pretty well how many of the top sites rank well. I know exactly how one does. The first thing is that their website URL contains the relevant words. That’s a big help because every single page of their website contains the desired keyword combination. They also own a mess of other sites, the ownership of which is hidden to various degrees, often to sock-puppet company levels, which are optimized for relevant, related, and high demand keyword combinations. Business logos. Corporate logos. Company logos. You get the idea. At various locations throughout those sites, there are links, usually with the appropriate anchor text, pointing at the target site. That’s the beginning of a network that Google’s algorithm interprets as a series of ‘votes‘ appearing like a lot of related websites are vouching for one particular website. For each of these sites, there’s a set of support splogs and websites, often hosted on sites like WordPress or Blogger. Those sites toss inbound links at both the secondary level of the network as well as the target site. For what it’s worth, and other than content scraping and logo raiding for content, we’re still probably in Grey Hat territory.

As an added ‘lift’ this company also parks dozens and dozens of themed articles, optimized with keywords, on free article sites, social media sites and just about anywhere else they can drop a link (though some free article sites are now using ‘no follow’ tags to get around being flagged by Google as a spam haven). Most of content for those articles has been scraped and re-purposed from other blogs, but in SEO tactics, still basic stuff. Where this company really shines in the Black Hat territory is through a free stats counter, offered through their parent company, that features a hidden, embedded link in either the counter image or as a text link underneath. That represents thousands of one-way inbound links, pointing at various sites in the network, upping their PR, which is then passed downwards towards the main site. While it’s probably Black Hat as hell, the target site is a regular feature of the top ten results for logo design on Google, and has moved up several spots in the last few weeks. Unfortunately, and despite Google’s protestations to the contrary, this stuff works.

If it works, can’t we do it too?

No. As much as it may irk anyone who’s either been squeezed out of the rankings, or can’t get any in the first place, nobody can really blame the sites ranking well. Nothing illustrates success better than success itself and as these sites are succeeding in gaming the SEO system, or coming pretty close, then it certainly behooves them to do so. If there’s a way to exploit a system, any system, many will take it once you factor in human nature, free market and basic greed. So, why shouldn’t you employ similar tactic? The first reason, a pragmatic one, is that you probably can’t afford the time. Or the money. Most of these sites employ people outside North America – many are actually located in South East Asia – and the cost of hiring a bunch of copy writers, bloggers and Twitter sock puppets is a fraction of what it would be in Europe and North America. It also explains why a lot of the articles on these sites don’t make a lot of sense, as they’ve been edited from one language to another, using content scraped from other sources. The second involves the sheer number of sites. Most Black Hat SEO for the organizations we’ve been discussing takes place far away from their main, flagship sites, which are kept as ‘pristine’ as possible. The other domains in their network are ‘throwaway’. Ever wonder why some of these companies created a multitude of similar websites, all with identical offerings and functions, but with different branding and skins? Now you know. This is also one of the reasons that many of these sock puppet sites can make outrageous promises and sales pitches that they never intend to keep. They don’t give a shit about the online reputation of their sock puppet business names, caring only about the rep of their flagship sites. And even then, some resort to bogus logo design review sites to carefully control that reputation too.

Google webmaster guidelines

Here’s the main hitch though. These sites aren’t supposed to be engaging in such tactics. That’s not me on a holier that thou soapbox either. It’s what services like Google tell us are against their webmaster guidelines. Supposedly, if one engages in such tactics there are severe consequences – penalties and even delisting for more egregious Black Hat efforts. Is it worth the risk? If you’ve got dozens, or hundreds of sites, perhaps. If you’ve got one or two, not so much. Here’s been my personal rule of thumb regarding our websites. As a bit of a Bad Luck Schleprock, I have a hunch that the minute I delved into the black hat bag of tricks, my domain would be nuked instantly. I’d be held up by big ‘G’ as the poster boy for Black Hat SEO in the logo design niche. I’m not willing to risk having our site removed from the search engine indexes, a death knell for any online logo design studio like mine. Alas, these other outfits seem to be able to get away with it, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on our chances. If that weren’t enough to deter me, I’m also am stuck with a ‘fairness’ switch that I can’t seem to turn off. A bit naive perhaps, but I’m stuck with it. Like you, I’ve been waiting for things to level up a bit, and I’ve been waiting a long time. I don’t think that wait’s going to end anytime soon either. Not all is lost though. I used the phrase in the subtitle upstairs, but I’ll use it again here. “A rising tide lifts all boats“. We’ll discuss that in more depth in a bit. You should also know that getting to be top ten for ‘logo design’ isn’t as big deal as you might think.

Is getting a top 10 Google spot the only way?

No. It’s not. There’s only ten top spots on a Google front page for ANY keyword search. That’s it. If you’re #1 cool (though most searchers also click on spots two & three). After that, the number of clicks and visitors starts to drop off dramatically. Logically, if the top three spots on Google were the only positions that were worthwhile, there would only be three companies, in any category, doing any business on the internet. Or if it’s the top ten, it would stand to reason that there’d only be ten healthy corporations in any given internet niche. Obviously, that’s not the case. Take a look at this chart grabbed from Alexa, a site traffic monitoring site, yesterday. Our site, The Logo Factory, is the blue squiggly line.

Our site positively sucks when it comes to ranking for an exact “logo + design” keyword search. Last time I looked (and I don’t look often), we were hovering around the top of page six, bottom of page five. If getting on the first page of Google for that set of keywords was the key to our existence, we’d have closed our doors a long time ago, shortly after we slid off the front page around 2005. But take a look at our traffic, at least as judged by Alexa (above). We manage to hold our own, and often beat the traffic levels of some of the sites on page one. Having a site in the high, to mid 30,000 range is a pretty decent achievement for a small shop like ours, and we did it while languishing in the depths of a logo design keyword search. How? Long tail keyword searches. See, a lot of people do search for logo design. But a helluva lot search for related phrases too. Logo design studio is one example, and we’re number 6 for that. A lot of niche searches too, restaurant logos, is one. Logo design tips is another. I write a lot of content, on our blog and our site proper, about a wide variety of topics, some specific to design, others not so much. All of the traffic from those pages adds up to more overall traffic than we’d get if we did rank on the first page of Google. I gave up keyword stuffing and SEO focused writing years ago (I got tired of the same blather as everyone else in the game) and found that (hopefully) quality, original content ranked much better than keyword soaked nonsense that nobody wanted to read. I was happier. I’m sure readers were happier. And at the end of the day (hopefully) it makes for a better experience for everybody. Oh sure, I still optimize our pages for the topic at hand, but usually it has something to do with more than the two keywords that everyone else is battling for. Have it at hoss. It’s a waste of my time, and yours, angsting over a front page placement for two keywords, when there’s thousands of combinations that are much easier to obtain rankings for. Should point out that even long tailed searches involve inbound link love using the concept we discussed earlier. With social media replacing a lot of blog activity and natural inter-site linking, where can we get links to our site? Twitter and Facebook, right? Not really.

Twitter & Facebook are groovy. But not for SEO

Whenever we finish writing a blog post or article, we’re in a rush to announce it via our Twitter accounts. We’ve got some auto-ack plugin that shoots out a message to our account shortly after a new blog is published (though I’ve never been able to figure out the seemingly random times it does so). That’s a pretty cool way to get ‘fast traffic’ and your Twitter followers will follow the link, read the piece, and then Re-Tweet it to their followers. That’s what it’s all about. But how good is Twitter for SEO? Not very I’m afraid. Firstly, most of us use URL shortening services like Bit.ly and TinyUrl.com. And that’s where the link love would be headed. If our Twitter pages were passing any link love, which they ain’t. All the external links from your Twitter account are tagged as ‘no follow’ links. Other than direct traffic, a link from Twitter won’t improve your search engine rankings at all. In the big picture stuff, this is a good thing, as sites that have ‘do follow’ links are abused without mercy by spammers and Twitter wouldn’t be half as cool as it is now. In the ‘how do I get rankings for my site‘ small picture stuff, and while Google occasionally publishes related feeds as part of their search results, any long-term SEO benefits from Twitter and Facebook are minimal.

Blog commenting is for conversation

Used to be that comments (and guest books before blogs) were great for SEO link love. Like most things that can be abused by spammers, they were, and most modern blog comments feature ‘no follow’ tags on name and comment fields (though by the number of automated comment spams and keyword soaked ‘name’ fields that are still submitted to any blog, you wouldn’t know it). See, comment fields were never meant to be an SEO tool, they were designed for, well, commenting. Taking part in whatever discussion, debate or full-fledged flame war that the post above them managed to generate. That’s not to say you shouldn’t comment on your favorite blog’s latest entry. You should. It’s what makes blogs fun and relevant. Any SEO benefits are marginal, but you will get traffic to your site if you offer up engaging opinions, and people click on your website link to find out more about you. Which is why automated comment spam like “I like your site. I have book marked if for future reference” and a link to a pharmaceutical site are completely and utterly pointless. If they got past the Akismet filters in the first place. With the ‘no follow’ tag, no SEO benefit. With the dopey vagueness of the comment, no-one’s likely to want more information. No clicky on the linky. There are some blogs around that advertise that their comment section features ‘do follow’ links, but these are few and far between. We experimented with ‘do follow’ comments on our blog for a bit, but shut it down el pronto when comment spammers found out. And told all their friends. Sadly, there are people who’ll ruin everything for everybody, and when it comes to SEO, that’s the rule, rather than the exception.

Sharing is where it’s at

Someone recently asked me this “why do you link to your competition on your blog?” And it’s true, I’ve never been shy about linking to any site using (in most circumstances) ‘do follow’ links. My answer is simple and threefold. One, I don’t give a crap about sharing a little link love with anyone, even people who are my competitors. If I’m mentioning them, often in critical ways, I feel I ‘owe’ them the link. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter to me, and if I can use a link to prove a point, or to give credit, I will do so. Second, and more importantly, it makes the internet what it is. The triple Ws at the beginning of any web address stand for ‘World Wide Web‘. Think of a spider’s web, and how the infrastructure is built. My site is part of that web and so, by the way, is yours. Thirdly, I don’t want to write every day how wonderful The Logo Factory studio is. Or how great our work is. That’s boring for readers. It also happens to be boring for me. If I find something that’s on another site that I find interesting, regardless of how tangentially it relates to logo design, there’s a very good chance I’ll write about it. Quote it. And link to it. Lest you think I’m being completely altruistic, or singing some internet version of Kumbaya, let me assure you I’m not. See, if I happen to crank out something you dig, I’d hope you’d do the same for me. Which helps us both. From an SEO point of view, we’re doing the same things as the guys we mentioned above, organically, with different related sites, and enjoying the same SEO benefits as they do on their network. Without all the subterfuge and shadiness. Isolating your blog or site, in order to capture any business that might stumble in is ultimately penny wise, and pound foolish. Is promoting your competition, and they promoting you, a wise idea? Why, yes it is.

Competition is nothing to be afraid of

I’ve often said that there’s more than enough business for designers to go around. And I stick to that basic premise. It’s only when folks decide to ‘own’ a certain market, do the SEO shenanigans begin. Anyone that knows about James Bond‘s baddie organization SPECTRE will realize that whenever global domination becomes the goal, ethics go out the window. This isn’t isolated to logo and design categories. Take a look at other niches – travel, legal, gambling and yes, even porn – and you’ll see the same kind of stuff. When dealing with a largely unregulated marketplace, which the Internet HAS to be, we have to deal with the lowest common denominators. It’s one of those sad, but true, facts of life. What people can do, as opposed to what they should do. So what should designers do? Link up our bloody sites, that’s what. But what about linking to your supposed ‘competition’ and losing clients? That, my friend, is a load of bollocks. See, I’ve always been of the opinion that if I lose a client, or some business, simply by featuring a link to another site on mine, then I haven’t made a very good pitch about our design services in the first place. Not only that, and in practical terms, most blog roll links, indeed most links throughout a blog, don’t really send a lot of people away from your site. I monitored my offsite clicks for about a month before realizing that. And if you’re still scared about losing a gig, open the window in a new tab. See, here’s the thing. Having the option to leave to a related site offers a whole lot more credibility than trying to trap site visitors like rats. In any case, say you do lose the occasional client (and that’s highly unlikely), you’ll probably make it up with someone hitting your site via a link from another site. Ebb and flow. Yin and Yang. I like how Graham Smith, a UK based freelance logo designer, explained his linking to The Logo Factory site:

“Some have said to me why would I send traffic, potential clients Steve’s’ way. Surely I am encouraging potential clients to go elsewhere. There may be an element of truth to this, but it’s all about choice at the end of the day. We all have our own styles, our own unique selling points, our own way of doing business. We are much more unique then just being lumped into the ‘logo design’ tag. My style is far different to Logo Factory, our prices are different, our approach is different. I have confidence in my own work to not worry about the odd client finding another designer. If they are happier working with someone else, for whatever reason, then so be it. What goes round comes round.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Shouldn’t have to point out that this page illustrates this concept very nicely. Now, I may lose some clients who click on the link to Graham’s I’m Just Creatve web site, but ditto on the “so be it“. As the chap says “what goes around, comes around” and let’s leave global domination to outfits like Logoworks, Logo Design Guru and SPECTRE.

A little bit of cooperation goes a long way

Not that this simple concept pans out in execution. Over the years I’ve had an open invitation for designers, companies and yes, even our competitors to send us their press releases. And over those years, I can count the number of people who’ve done so on my right hand. No idea why, other than the ‘competitor’ factor we talked about last paragraph. Here’s the thing to keep in mind. I have a logo design blog, one of the sections is industry news. I need content. When it comes to scouring the internet for content, I have to invest hours of time that I’d prefer not to spend. If you’ve got a worthy blog post that I might dig, or some news about your work, it saves me time if you send it in. If it’s newsworthy, I’ll publish it. With a link to your site. If you’ve written a great blog post that you feel all designers should read, hit me up with a link. I’d love to give it a mention. I’m only a a contact form or Twitter DM away. Naturally, I’d like the same from you. Not that I’ve been terribly persistent in my own sharing activities. I haven’t. I took a look at our blog roll the other day. Pathetic. Only features five links, when it should feature dozens. Or more. Over all the years I’ve been curating this blog, I’ve only had two people ask to be included. Despite telling people on numerous occasions that we’re open to exchanging some traffic. Funny thing is, I’ve never asked anyone either. Bad Steve. No donut. Seems I forget the rising tides concept myself. Anyway, here’s the takeaway for you and me both, of this 4,827 word diatribe. Designers shouldn’t be afraid to link to each other, creating an organic ‘network’ of sharing and caring sites. Because as we discussed earlier, that’s how many of the top 50 cats are doing it.

Except for the organic bit.

Postscript:

Here’s a little something to keep in mind. There’s some evidence that Google is suspicious of site-wide links to other sites, that is, your link on every single page of a website. If you run a WordPress installation there’s a plug-in that allows you to keep Blog Roll links as ‘do follow’ on your home page, while turning the subsequent page blog rolls into the ‘no follow’ variety. Only one link is active, so you’re sending link love, but there’s no suggestion that your blog is a link farm, while the majority of your blog pages aren’t leaking PR all over the place. We use it here. Also, this article has ruffled a few feathers with another logo design company who decided to ‘strike back’ against it. You can read about that little skirmish here.

Related posts:

1. 33,000 Google crawl errors
2. Should designers blog?
3. More flattery, I guess…

In the cut-throat game of online logo design marketing, some companies are using logo raiding, a tactic that creeps closer and closer to the boundaries of ethics, and perhaps treads over copyright itself.

Latest trend in the online logo design game? Logo Raiding. Never heard of it? You have now. That’s when blog publishers (often producing the blog as an SEO ‘booster’ for another target site), raid logo galleries or portfolio sites (the popular Logo Pond is a favored source, Brandstack is another) for dozens of logo examples from other designers. These logos are then assembled in a keyword drenched post that’s only purpose is to score high ranking in search engines, usually wrapped around some weirdly nebulous logo ‘theme’. Say ’50 emotional logos’, ’20 logos with movement’ or ’60 really cool coffee logos’. Or strange thematic battles that feature ‘This Type of Logos’ versus ‘These Types of Logos’. When people are looking for say, ‘emotional’, ‘movement’, or ‘coffee’ logos in Google or Yahoo!, they’ll find these pages. Like any kind of search engine marketing, this is to get eyeballs on a page. And convert those eyeballs to paying customers.

No credit, no link, no gain

Trouble is, the designs are usually presented without credit or linkage, and any benefit goes solely to the blog hosting the logos, and then onto the target site, either directly via a link, or indirectly through inbound link love. And while the site, or company, using the logos to boost their search engine rankings don’t exactly claim that they designed the logos, they don’t exactly ‘fess up that they didn’t. A perfectly reasonable person might assume they did, so guess who they’re going to ask to “design a logo like this one”? The site hosting the raided logo, or one of their linked ‘partners’, usually a universe, and often a continent, removed from the designer that actually designed it. Usually the company that actually owns, and operates, the blog in the first place.

In use corporate logos vs. concept designs

It’s not like these sites are using the marks of giant corporations (something which we’re all cool with I suppose). Designers write tons of blog posts that critique corporate logos, often quite savagely. So, what’s the difference with logo raiding? That’s the easy part. Most of the logos raided from online logo galleries are ‘concept’ logos, and as such, still the property of the designer. Bottom line, designers’ ‘raw’ work is being used, without credit, permission or link love, to promote another website and the logo design company that’s behind it. I don’t imagine ‘Fair Use’ would cover the practice either. From what I understand, uncredited use of others’ work, for commercial gain, remains taboo, DMCA or not. And from were I sit, this use ain’t very fair at all.

Using competitor’s work to compete against them?

While I get the whole design community ‘we’re in this together vibe’ these sites try to germinate (usually by going to extraordinary lengths to hide their true ownership), the naked truth is most of these blogs are run by cut-throat bastards who are using the work of their competition to promote themselves via search engines. They’re not trying to promote the designers presented, nor send link love or actual business their way. You know, in a quid pro quo hat tip for use of the work. And while sites like Logo Pond and Brandstack feature profiles and links and contact methods for potential clients, on these “40 best logo” posts, the designers aren’t even mentioned.

Displaying design work is for promotion

Oddly, I’ve read comments from some designers stating they’re “honored” to be featured in these spurious gallery pages. Not sure why anyone would be honored by a potential competitor using their logo design work, especially when the designers aren’t credited, nor their sites linked to. Their profiles on the page, save the logos themselves, are non-existent. As far as I understand this internet marketing thing, promotion is the main purpose of showing logo design examples in the first place. More often than not, the designers featured have no idea of the real purpose of the post their work is presented on. Or who’s really doing the presenting. And while it may be cool to see one’s logo ‘in lights’, the promotional gain for the use is zero. Even weirder, the copyright notices on these blogs, usually blanket statements at the bottom of each page, technically claim copyright for the logos presented above it.

Nature of the web

Am I being nit-picky or absolutist? Perhaps. I must admit I do like control of my work. And yes, like many design blogs, I sometimes feature logos that I really like, but I always try to ask permission first, and if that’s not possible, try to track down the designer so that I can at least credit them. Maybe send a little business their way. That’s the ebb and flow nature of the internet and online design marketing. We all pinch a little, stitching various bits and pieces of other people’s work into our own, unique posts and articles, presumably with credit via a mention or link. The designs used in logo raider posts are the post. It’s simply a cynical ploy to pepper search engines using other designers’ work. Without asking to use that work. Or to credit for it. So why would supposedly legitimate logo design companies lift, en masse, other people’s work to feature as wonky galleries on their blog? For the answer to that, we need to understand why these companies hide their identities in the first place.

Why all the subterfuge?

Before spec work and logo design contests started taking some of the heat, many graphic designers were fundamentally opposed to online logo companies. Hated ‘em all. Yes, even our humble shop, referring to the genre as “logo mills” and “logo factories” (the latter one’s unfortunate, especially when your company name is The Logo Factory). It’s something that we’ve kinda put up with over the years, but other than a couple of flame wars here and there, we’ve nestled into our own little niche in the design community. Other companies think, perhaps with some validity, that designers opposed to the business model wouldn’t engage their main sites, and thus they’d miss out on all the benefits of such engagement. No comments, no inbound links and in the era of Twitter and Facebook, no social media love. Solution? Create a pseudo-entity (or entities) that while hiding all ties with the mothership, aim the SEO benefits towards it. Designers, none the wiser, link to the blog, join in the comments and ‘retweet’ posts they like around Twitter. It’s pretty cynical, but it works. Pragmatically speaking, these disguised blogs aren’t supposed to belong to the target company, so they can’t use their own work ’cause If they did, the jig would be up. Trouble is, a blog needs content, multiple blogs need lots of content and producing original material is extremely time consuming (one of the reasons for blog content scraping, which some of these sites also engage in). Raiding other logo gallery sites is so much easier. Taking minutes vs. hours, it’s cheaper too. These 20, 30, and 40 best logo posts all follow the same format. An somewhat oddly worded introductory paragraph that pitches the supposed ‘theme’. Then 30 raided logos plastered over the page. It is an exceptionally effective way to produce blog content and in this era of ROI (Return on Investment), the ROI on these posts is phenomenal, especially when it comes down to search engine penetration, the primary purpose of the activity. Accordingly, logo raiding is starting to be used by a lot of pseudo design blogs (belonging to other companies, they’re more splogs than not) and I’m not the only one who’s noticed. David Airey wrote an excellent post about the practice last week.

I don’t think it’s the last we’re going to hear about it either.

Related posts:

1. Do you know who’s designing your logo?
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3. Again with the design contests

Speaking about legal threats, just received one ourselves. A rather ominous, threatening and very lengthy Cease & Desist from some huge IT company out of Karachi, Pakistan. Seems someone took umbrage with a four-year-old blog post that we had kinda forgot all about. Actually, not the blog post itself, but a 55 word comment posted by some anonymous dude, also from Karachi, almost four years after the post was published. Even threatened to throw us in jail, they did. Usually, this would necessitate a call to our Mum, but figured this time, we’d not only comply with the C & D, but update the post to boot. You know, to set the record straight. [Updated Post]

Speaking about 99designs, a little bit of buzz about their ‘ready-made logo‘ service that they launched a few weeks ago. Their new ‘logo store’ mostly features outcasts and rejects from 99designs logo design contests (for the time being, only designers who have won a contest on the Australian ‘crowdsourcing’ platform qualify to upload images), and offers customizable logos starting at $99, for non-exclusive stuff, to just under three hundred for exclusive stuff. Some designers were none-too-impressed with the announcement of the plan, partially due to the spec work nature of the endeavor (designers only get paid when the logos are sold), the amount designers are getting (30 points of the sale provided they ‘hop to it’ when revisions are requested) and the fact that many people can purchase the same logo design over and over again, at odds with the point of a logo in the first place (so-called ‘non exclusive’ logos are nothing new, and can lead to all sorts of interesting situations). Anyhow, and despite the criticism, Matt Mickiewicz, one of the founders, was thrilled that 99designs managed to beat iStock Photo to the punch, (iStock announced it would be selling stock logos last fall) and twattered about the coup via Twitter (above). I guess it’s true that 99designs did beat iStock out of the gate, so if this sort of thing is important, congrats are in order. But if this kind of thing is important, should probably point out that 99designs failed to beat a host of others to launch. Outfits like Logo Yes, Logo Snap, Brand Stack, Logo Maker, Insta Logo, Logo Ease, Pixel Logo and a bazzilion others, all of whom have been flogging logo templates, stock logos and other variations of a theme for years. Hell, we launched our own stock logo website, Logos in a Box almost ten years ago, back in 2001 (courtesy The Wayback Machine). Even charged $99 too. And like the lads at 99designs, we offered multiple purchases of our stock logos (limited to 10 per) but scrubbed that idea shortly after launch. After having an fair play epiphany, we realized that selling multiple logos to multiple people was impossible to police, an affront to the idea of a logo, unfair to the customers buying them and smacked of general design dooshbaggery. [99designs]

Anyone remember the fairly in-depth look we took at logo design review sites a year and-a-bit back? Let’s bottom line it. Evidence suggested that some, ahm, “independent” logo review sites weren’t as “unbiased” as they claimed, looking like they were owned and operated by, quell suprise, the frikkin’ company that owned the sites they were doling out top marks to. And several other of the top spots too. With that in mind let’s looky here. In the current Logoblog.org “independent” reviews of “The Top 10 Logo Design Companies“, the number one site, Logo Design Guru, is still number one. No real surprise there. They’re always number one (wink, wink). Now there’s a new reviewee, Mycroburst, a design contest site that’s been parked in the number two spot of the “unbiased, reliable and independent” reviews, pretty much since the day it launched back in the fall. How this site got into the “Top Ten” list of logo design companies within a few weeks of launch is anyone’s guess, but get in they did, and as of today, Mycroburst boasts 4.4 stars out of five, while bigger, older and more established ‘crowdsourcing’ sites like 99designs and Crowdspring don’t even rate a mention. You can probably figure out where this is headed, but guess who operates the Mycroburst site? Uh-huh. None other than Guru Corporation, the company that claims Logo Design Guru as one of its “brands” on their Guru Corporation website. Right beside Mycroburst. To make matters even more, ahm, interesting, Logoblog.org recently ran an article ‘Spec Work in Logo Design: Boon or Bane?‘ that was supposed to take a look at both sides of the contentious debate about spec work. You know, the way Mycroburst operates on a day-to-day basis. Besides figuring out that spec work isn’t so evil after all (guess Mycroburst were relieved), and suggesting designers “chill” about the entire thing, the article also reveals this little nugget: “My message for aspiring designers…big logo design companies claim to hate spec work but then discovered to be owners of contest sites.” You don’t say. [Logo Blog]

Speaking about oddities and Mycroburst, the “Boon or Bane” article on Logoblog.org is a thematic doppleganger of the “Spec-Work: A curse or a blessing for Graphic Designers?” article that ran over on GraphicDesignBlog.org a few months ago. Funny enough, author Charlie B. Johnson also discovered that spec work wasn’t so evil after all, advising graphic designers to “join in hands to contribute to the changing world of graphic design.” You know, kick in with the spec work. Odd thing though. That piece was written shortly after this post, in which Charlie positively raves about Mycroburst as “A New Warehouse for Graphic Designers“, telling readers to “Go for it!!“. Even stranger, and while admitting that “design contests are not live yet” (wonder how he knew Mycroburst was gonna be so peachy?) Charlie told designers that it was “high time to get ourselves registered, so our creative juices get flowing as soon as the contests are announced“. Seemed odd that a graphic designer would gush over yet another design contest website so enthusiastically, advising young designers to sign up for a spec site that had yet to prove itself, not having launched (at the time) a single, solitary contest. As the resident spec work ‘fly in the ointment’ I did what I usually do. Ask the question.

To date, no answer (though between you and me, I didn’t really expect one). Now, a few months later, Charlie’s site is replete with tons of Mycroburst ads and this odd little coinky dinky. A clicky on his free logo linky will lead you to Logo Snap. You know, Logo Design Guru’s flash logo generator thingamajig. That’s awfully sporting Charlie. [Graphic Design Blog]

On a completely unrelated matter that we weren’t talking about, anyone heard about the new FTC blogging regulations? Actually, debuting back in December, they’re not that new, but I’m sure a lot of bloggers and site owners are unaware, so let’s take a little time to have a looksee. Apparently, it’s now an issue if you endorse, or review, a product or service without disclosing your relationship with, or payment from. It’s supposed to level the playing field and protect consumers and, I dunno, designers, from unfair or unethical stuff they call “stealth marketing” and “conversational deception“, especially through the ever-growing area of social media. This isn’t the first time someone has tried to stem internet asshattery with search engine giant Google claiming to have taken a stance against “paid links“, particularly those designed to inflate ‘inbound link love’ to other sites, artificially inflating the PR of the target. Judging by some quick searches, as well as some discussions with others, Google’s campaign has been less than successful. Now, the Federales are getting in on the action, but not without some resistance. Seeing the move as an assault on “free speech“, some positively hate the idea of the Feds barging into the wild-west nature of the internet. Others think it’s a worthy effort, hoping the FTC nails “blogging scoundrels” seeing the regulations as a predictable price for “collective bad behavior“. Not sure how they’re going to enforce it with over 10,000,000 blogs, and I suppose it won’t have any effect on sites that are parked outside the USA but taking a look at Communication Overtone‘s summary of the regs, it’s a noble goal, I suppose. Don’t you agree Charlie? [New York Times]

Related posts:

1. Tip o’ the Pint design snippets. September edition
2. Snippets: Crowdsourcing advice for designers, IE6 must die & more unbiased logo reviews
3. Snippets: The 10% better than 99designs, more stock logo shenanigans and the strange story of Brandstack edition

The bitter-free, Spring Tip o’ the Pint, weekend edition of our regular snippets feature. Throwing a little link love to blogs, websites, logos and logo design articles we kinda dug.

To Upstack. In this spec work, crowdsourcing and design contest era, would be remiss if I didn’t tip a pint towards people who are tilting against the tide. Accordingly, would like to congratulate the good people at Upstack, a web-based design platform that attempts to pair buyers and designers on various projects. In a sea of websites and spec driven companies that all claim to be “doin’ some innovating” (but are merely retreads of each other), it’s nice to see a new operation that’s actually appears, well, innovative. The website, currently in BETA, is lovely, the user interface extremely well done and, as boasted on the front page, the entire operation is spec work free. I’ve given the site a few gears over the past few months, but that was all in good fun (or at least, it was supposed to be) so I’d like to take this opportunity to wish them the best. And if you’re a designer who’s profoundly opposed to spec work, it’s probably worth the effort to hit Wes & Co. up for an invite. [Upstack]

To the Spartan Golf Club logo. Even though I’ve been in this business for way too long, once in a while I’ll stumble over a logo that really grabs my attention, a remarkable piece of design magnificence that works on so many levels. You know, the kind of logo that I wished I designed. And the kind of logo I’ll probably never design. Like this example, a stock logo from Brandstack (we just discussed their fraternal site Upstack) for a business that involves Spartans and Golf. Accordingly, a tip of the pint to Lex Logo (probably not his real name, if you know what that is, let me know.) for creating a mark that has a few of us a little green with envy. Well done sir. And, if you’re thinking about opening a golf club, calling it Spartan, and have $3,600 ready to spend, how could you NOT buy this logo? Comes with the web domain too. Update: Designer of this logo is Richard Fonteneau. [Brandstack]

To Mike Erickson. I’ve known logo designer Mike Erickson for years now and count him among my friends in the industry. We often chat about design, logos (particularly more illustrative logos, one of Mike’s specialties, and our favored style) as well as the personal ups and downs of well, living. Mike’s just launched his new Logomotive site, and have to give him kudos for a particularly nice job. I know it wasn’t easy, as in the re-brand he tossed a duck logo (that he’s been using for eons) in favor of his new train theme (more corporate, and a motif suggested by his business name). Very similar to the angst we went through when we tossed our Factory house last fall, so if they were real pints we’re tossing about, we’d probably be crying into them. I’d also like to bring your attention to this bit of typography porn on Mike’s site. Bottom line, if ever you wanted to find out about what makes up letters, or what all the bits and pieces are called, this page has everything you’ll need to know. [Logomotive]

To the Marquee design agency. We hoist a glass to the people at Marquee, the design agency that developed the new Glasgow Commonweath Games logo. After the design came under fire for looking like previous work, the agency issued a classic example of logo symbolism porn that described in exquisite detail how the mark came to be. The design, based on three concentric circles, two of which are broken, with the letter G in the center, apparently resembles a black and white design created in 2007 by Marquee for The Common Guild, a Glasgow arts group. Not so, claimed Games organizers and agency wonks, insisting that the logo is original, with the broken circles representing “time, data and measurement” something they claim is “the basis of all sport“. The logo is supposed to be based on four numbers associated with the Games – 20 as in the 20th time the event has been held, 17 sports being represented, 11 days of the competition and one host city. Accordingly, the “second ring is 17/20ths of the outer circle, the third ring is 11/20ths and the G stands for Glasgow“. Yowzah. These cats are good. Still not sure if it beats this logo symbolism manifesto though. [Telegraph UK]

To Logo Design Love. Interviews with logo designers are all well and good I suppose, but after a while, many start to sound, or read, the same. Some tips. Sources of inspiration. The usual. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had an interview that was a little off the beaten path? Imagine if there was a designer who specializes in, oh, I dunno, Death Metal and Goth Rock logos. He’d be interesting to talk to, huh? Well, look no further, because it just so happens there is. His name is Christophe Szpajdel (pronounced “shpydel”) and he’s considered “Lord of the Logos” among the Black Metal set. Logo Design Love, the all-things-logo blog curated by UK designer David Airey features a fascinating interview with Szpajdel (by Blair Thomson) and takes a look at his work, his new book and how he finds inspiration for his famous nature-driven work. Alas, I’m a little late to the party with this one, so you’ve missed out on Airey’s free draw for the “Lord of Logos” book. Humble apols for that, but the interview is still worth a read, free book or not. Besides, if you’re really gung-ho, you can always buy it via a link at the piece. [Logo Design Love]

Have an interesting blog piece, logo or ‘different’ take on the graphic design industry that might make interesting fodder for an upcoming Snippet feature? Feel free to drop us a line. You can also hit us up on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. Tip o’ the Pint design snippets. September edition
2. Snippets: Battling logos, a couple of Pint Tips, just like 99designs & the IRS logo scam edition
3. Snippets: Crowdspring to offer spec writing, NEA holds a spec work contest & other news