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Using 99Designs: Sourcing low cost logo designs – PART 2

By Nick Barker

We’ve now got a great logo for our new Aware Monitoring service using 99Designs:

aware-monitoring_finallogo

Our logo was developed with the final designer over a number of ideas:

awaremointoring_keegan1st_99designs

In the end we had 37 designers who produced 146 design concepts which I gave 78 feedback comments on.  The contest started at break neck pace over a weekend. It takes more time than you think to look at, rate and comment on all the designs. The design quality varied a great deal. Here are two examples of the more elaborate designs. In our 99design brief we said we wanted a clean, simple modern logo.

awares_elaberate99designideas

We found it very useful to look at each designers past work. As we did with the Elance bids for our Viisys logo. This approach helps to choose which designers to encourage.  Clearly the designers have to be careful where to put their efforts in because no win, no cash. I did feel uncomfortable rejecting 36 peoples efforts.  These are our final contest results:

awaremonitoring_finalresults

To view the full Aware Logo design contest at 99Designs site click here. The winner Keegan from Indonesia has entered a staggering 716 events and won 43 to date. That’s a mere 6% conversion rate. The contest is definitely in the contest holders favour with the designer taking most of the risk. However at an average of $300 per logo Keegan will have earned $12,900 on his 43 wins plus any extra followup work.

The Internet and crowd sourcing continues to plough through traditional business models e.g. the newspaper industry, music distribution, software, etc and now logo design. 99Designs brought us more choice and ideas which developed between all the competing designers. It was a good experience and I would recommend both 99Designs and Elance despite the ethical debate and unhappy traditional designers.

Local designers will have to adapt to the new market place or they will be marginalised. When our startup grows up and has more cash it would be great to use and compare top end niche designers like this who developed Jive Software’s logo. But for now we are extreme bootstrapping and as the saying goes fail cheaply and quickly.

“The only barrier to failing fast and failing cheap is your ego. You must be willing to fail, fail, and fail again if you are going to win in today’s competitive marketplace.” BusinessWeek 2007

My other startup related posts:

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    This entry was posted on January 28, 2009 at 9:42 am and is filed under Marketing, startup. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

    13 Responses to “Using 99Designs: Sourcing low cost logo designs – PART 2”

    1. Paul Annesley Says:
      January 28, 2009 at 10:10 am | Reply

      Glad you’re happy with the logo :)

      Thanks for the great writeup of the process.

      Cheers,
      Paul

    2. Nick Barker Says:
      January 28, 2009 at 10:28 am | Reply

      Hi Paul

      I appreciate the feedback. 99Designs are doing well ;)

      Thanks

      Nick

    3. Salt Lake City Web design Says:
      January 28, 2009 at 10:48 am | Reply

      Very good logos.We have good graphic designers with us.It will help them for designing new logo’s.

    4. San Diego Website Design Says:
      January 29, 2009 at 11:02 am | Reply

      What is the best logo design software?

    5. Nick Barker Says:
      January 29, 2009 at 11:29 pm | Reply

      Adobe Illustrator ;)

    6. Keegan Says:
      January 31, 2009 at 4:08 pm | Reply

      Yes I made them in Adobe Illustrator CS3

    7. Nick Barker Says:
      January 31, 2009 at 5:32 pm | Reply

      Hey Keegan!

      Great designer + Great app = Fantastic design :)

    8. Sourcing low cost logo designs - PART 1 « Nickpoint Says:
      February 3, 2009 at 2:30 pm | Reply

      [...] Using 99Designs: Sourcing low cost logo designs – PART 2 [...]

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      [...] Using 99Designs: Sourcing low cost logo designs – PART 2 [...]

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      February 20, 2009 at 11:23 am | Reply

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      [...] right person? – Keegan is one of the best freelancers we’ve worked with. We found Keegan through 99Designs and used him for our logo, business cards, Launch page and a new blog for Bootstrapping. Why did it [...]

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      April 16, 2009 at 8:45 pm | Reply

      [...] right person? – Keegan is one of the best freelancers we’ve worked with. We found Keegan through 99Designs and used him for our logo, business cards, Launch page and a new blog for Bootstrapping. Why did it [...]

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