Key topics:

• Reviews of the crowdsourcing experience from the client perspective
• Reviews of crowdsourcing sites and tools like 99designs.com, crowdspring.com, cambrianhouse.com, innocentive.com, innovationexchange.com, vencorps.com, and kluster.com
• Ratings and recommendations on crowdsourcing tools
• Crowdsourcing methods and best practices

In the past, I had worked with an individual designer at a local ad agency to design a couple of logos and was quite happy with the results. But I remembered that the last time I worked on a logo, I wasn’t completely happy with the proposals the designer offered and I ended up sketching out the logo myself and then handing it over for final execution. This time, I really didn’t have any inspirations about how the logo should look so the idea of casting a wide net and soliciting designs from numerous designers was very appealing. Another factor that made the decision easier was that the cost of hiring a designer directly was quite a bit more than the costs involved with crowdsourcing. The one thing I was worried about, however, was that I would pay for the design contest and not receive one good logo. At least I knew I could get a logo I liked by working one-on-one with a designer. But in the end, I decided to give it a try.

So with marginal approval from my business partner, I started the process of posting the logo design project on crowdspring.com. But because I am very cautious, I wanted to kick the tires a bit more before entering my credit card details. I poked around featured contests on crowdspring and also Googled crowdspring and crowdsourcing. What I found actually led me away from crowdspring.com.

First, I found that although most contests on crowdspring.com received some pretty good entries from talented designers, they also received a lot of pretty bad designs from apparently untalented designers. In fact, there was one designer that was so bad and seeemed to be spamming numerous contests with atrocious designs, that I completely halted the posting of my project on crowdspring. I simply did not want to receive such garbage, or as one designer put it, “visual pollution.” I don’t know if it’s bad form to reveal the designer, but the username is “acidclank” and the profile page is here. Some of the designs that scared me off were submitted in this contest for an electronic medical records starrtup. Even the username “acidclank” conjured up visions of getting doused in acid and hurled down a metal staircase. Needless to say, I was hoping my company might get a slightly better start in life.

After being halted in my tracks by acidclank, I did more research on crowdsourcing and design competitions. I’ll talk about the controversy raging in the design world in a later post, but for now that’s too big an issue to address here. One interesting find I came across was a guy who had posted contests on both crowdspring.com and 99designs.com in order to compare the results. From his experiment, he concluded that the designers on crowdspring were of a much higher standard than 99designs but his methodology was deeply flawed in that the contests were quite different: on crowdspring it was for a logo, on 99designs it was for a flyer. Those are very different and I have noticed that logo competitions seem to get far more interest from designers than graphic design contests, which probably require more work and involve far more elements than a logo.

Then I came across this useful comparison of the two competing sites. What got me was the traffic comparison on compete.com: 99designs.com has double the traffic of crowdspring.com! After seeing the traffic difference, I started paying more attention to 99designs and discovered that they were the original design contest site and crowdspring came along and copied their business model. Granted, crowdspring.com made some good tweaks like taking pre-payment from contest holders and arranging final payment to the winning designer and the site’s design is probably nicer than 99designs, but they clearly copied most of their DNA from 99designs. It even seems they got their logo by holding a contest on 99designs! 99designs subsequently took on some of crowdspring’s improvements so that now the two sites are quite similar in how they function.

In the end, I made the easy decision to go with 99designs. The site had double the traffic which almost assured me that I would get more entries and I was supporting the originals, not the copycats.

In upcoming posts, I’ll describe my experience on 99designs in detail.