Look Ma, I'm Crowdsourcing!
If you go to the kind of parties that I go to (full of techies who read too many business books), you've probably heard the term "crowdsourcing". Crowdsourcing, like outsourcing, refers to farming out a task to a group of people, but instead of hiring a specific person or team, you make an open request to a large group of loosely-associated professionals. Often, this comes in the form of a contest, with many people competing and only the "winner" being paid for the finished result.When I decided to farm out the User Effect logo, I was hesitant to spend too much money, and I decided to give crowdsourcing a go. To be honest, I had mixed feelings about the practice. On the one hand, the idea of letting a group dynamic tackle my project was fascinating to me, as a cognitive psychologist. On the other hand, as someone who makes a living in the internet industry, I hate to see our work commoditized and like to see people paid what they're worth.
I ended up working with a site called Design Outpost. The process was pretty simple: outline what you want in your logo design and set a deadline and prize amount (logo contests, at the time I did this, ran anywhere from $150-$500 plus a 10% administrative fee). Design Outpost has a team of participating designers, and those who wish to enter the contest post their ideas and you provide feedback, both in an open forum. Of course, generally speaking, the higher the prize amount, the more participation you can expect.
One key part of the process is also something I've found to be important in outsourcing a project: guidance and feedback. As someone with a bit of a design background, I think it was easier to communicate with designers and guide them towards what I wanted. Reading other people's threads (Design Outpost's default forums are public), it was obvious that the experience was much more frustrating for some than others.
Overall, I felt the process was a good fit for logo design. Branding, especially for a small business, is often a matter of personal taste and can be an emotional exercise. Any one designer, even a very experienced one, may just not think the same way you do, no matter how hard they try. In that sense, I appreciated being able to get multiple perspectives. It not only gave me options, but helped me to define what I wanted.
My winning designer was Rainier Robles, who goes by the handle elogonics, and I'd like to thank both him and the Design Outpost team. I was very happy with the iconography, which represents three people coming together to create a sort of vortex (a "user effect", if you will), and had a positive enough experience that I'm using Design Outpost for a second project.
Sean
· Wednesday, August 29How would you rate the effort in terms of time? From start to finish how long did it take you to get the logo you want and how much time was directly spent analyzing the submitted designs?
Dr. Pete
· Wednesday, August 29There's a definite cost/time tradeoff. The process takes a clear definition of the project, considerable feedback, and a little hand-holding. The overall start-to-finish time wasn't bad; about a month for me, but some people have gotten faster results with higher award amounts (as a friend of mine says: "fast, cheap, good: pick two"). My personal investment in the process was probably about 20 hours, but it would've taken me 40-80 to do it myself, and I probably wouldn't have been happy with the result.