I think you would end up with a better logo if you just did a call to your mailing list for designer recommendations, and paid a real designer $500 for a few hours of their work to come up with their best effort.
By opening a contest, you're not only going to get a much lower quality of submissions, but in the end, the final decision is going to be made by you, someone "useless at anything artistic".
Paying a designer $500 won't get you a full brand identity makeover, but that's not what you're going for. You should be able to find a talented designer who will spend an hour discussing what you want to get our of your logo, some time going over a number of their own ideas, and then wrap up the project and give you the sizes you need and a vector file if you ever need to scale your logo up or down.
in the end, the final decision is going to be made by you, someone "useless at anything artistic".
That's a fair point... but I do know what Tarsnap is, and it's not exactly "typical". I don't know how many non-tarsnap-using designers would come up with something which is consistent with the rest of the "tarsnap brand".
Well, part of the $500 would presumably be talking through the goals of the project, what message you want to convey with the logo, how you might want to extend the Tarsnap brand in the future, etc.
To put it another way, if you needed to roll out a new feature for Tarsnap but couldn't do it yourself, would you hire someone on contract, or do a contest for it?
He just wants something cool looking and memorable for the FreeBSD sponsors page and for his website. This is part of the problem with paying for designers (something I've done a bunch of times, to varying effect) --- they want to have a conversation about your brand and the message of the logo. No doubt there are productive conversations like that to be had with good designers --- but not in $500 logo projects.
To pay someone $500 and then not want to spend an hour with them making them understand your product/idea/whatever seems like a bit of a waste of money to me, likely making the results hit and miss.
Or have I misunderstood and you're saying that for $500 finding a designer than can hold that conversation is unlikely?
I think he will have a hard time getting a qualified designer to take a $500 project seriously. I have no doubt he can get something for $500, but it won't be something he likes.
You are right if you focus solely on designers from countries with a high cost of living. I'm pretty sure the friend who did my little shop's logo(you can see it at http://rightfold.io) could make something that Colin likes for less than 500$.
Paying a single designer directly can be really frustrating. $500 only buys you so many variations, and if none of them hit the mark, you are SOL, either settling for something "meh" or forking out more $$ for another round. At the low end, crowd sourcing logo design makes a lot of sense.
I don't agree. He's looking for something that he can't put his finger on. The likelihood that the one designer he chooses comes up with the best idea is low.
By holding the contest, he can get dozens of submissions. They may not be well-designed, but he can use the best theme from the designs submitted to hire a top-notch designer and polish it up, if need be.
Reread this and imagine it's a code contest. Less subjective maybe, but would you want to build for someone with such a vague demand? "I need it to do, err, I don't know. Can't quite put my finger on it."
No it's not. Good design is about solving a problem, and you can't do that without understanding the problem. Just like you (and me! because I'm a compiler programmer, at heart) can't really solve a problem we don't understand. You can't come to me and tell me to build you a mobile app for your business, just because I know the ARM architecture... I need to understand your business first.
You know what's funny? We use the word "design" for software, and you wouldn't think that you could run a contest to pick the design of a software system. But nevertheless you think someone can design his communication strategy & brand identity by a contest, without spending the time to write down the requirements first.
To the OP: my advice is, just don't bother with a contest or a logo. Find someone (a friend) who is good at typography, and ask him to typeset the word "Tarsnap" for you in a way that looks good on that banner. Just use that as a logo, until you have the time & resources to hire someone to do a proper brand identity for you (because that's what you are asking for here, not just a logo)
Question---how do designers who do this survive? $500 is not a lot of money---you'd need 100 of these projects/year to make 50K. Do designers do that many? If you've got bigger projects, something like this seems valuable as a sales tool rather than your bread and butter.
$500 is quite a bit of money if you live someplace relatively cheap. That could be Eastern Europe, somewhere in the midwestern US, the Philippines, or elsewhere. Granted, there may be more transaction costs working with people in those places, but in some situations, that may be worth it for the savings.
That's funny. The first thing that came to my mind was turnips. Maybe there should be a parsnip and a turnips in the logo. Maybe a parsnip pointing down between two turnips, in a T formation.
"Design contest" to a designer is what "prototype me my facebook idea" to a programmer. You will be laughed out of the room by professional designers at best, so what you will end up with a clipart logo based on a ripped concept done by someone who has zero idea of what tarsnap is (but who really needs your 500 bucks).
Do the right thing, Colin, call this thing off, take an hour to go through logopond and dribbble and email a dozen of guys you like. $500 is a good budget to get a good logo.
EDIT - alternatively, just pick a good sans font (something that you personally like and that matches well what you think tarsnap is about - simplicity, clarity, reliability, etc.), take a semibold or bold weight, type "tarsnip" in lowercase letters, kern it tightly and you got yourself a clean and concise wordmark.
And yet I bet he will get results and they will look good enough, even if you and everyone else who considers themselves a designer laughs at him.
He can actually judge the logos he gets and choose the best one (or potentially non at all). Designs don't have anything close to a monopoly on good(enough) taste.
Evaluating the quality of a code base, on the other hand, requires close to enough skill that you probably could write it your self. It's not analogous.
Every time I hear the name "Tarsnap" I think of the long skinny dragons on heraldic crests, so I'm with you thematically.
I think it's a bad idea to use a novelty display typeface for the name. Also, that typeface looks like something from a 1990s Front Line Assembly album.
Also, any typeface you pick better mesh well with Times New Roman, because Colin can be trusted to set type in that.
The castle will be hard to reproduce at different sizes, won't work at all in black and white, and is effectively clip art.
A good way to make sure that the designer gets the full fee (without losing a commission to 99designs or by them participating in a design contest with no guarantee of getting paid) is to choose one designer and offer them the $500.
Does the interest in design contests stem from a fear of paying and getting something you might not like? Or not knowing what you might like until you see it?
I have no idea what I might like. I'm hoping to get some discussion and sharing of ideas -- including from people who don't have any interest in or ability to actually produce a logo themselves.
If I knew that, say, I wanted a graphic of a piece of tar being snapped in half, I'd look for an artist and say "here's $500, please draw this for me". But given that I have no idea what I want, I figure the more people I invite to provide ideas the better.
Lots of people hire a graphic designer with no real idea of what they want--the point of a graphic designer is to talk to a client about the ideas and values of their business, think a lot about those things, go through a bunch of iterations, and then eventually end up with a finished product.
That takes a lot of work--usually at least 30 to 40 hours for a good logo. Would you put in 40 hours of work for somebody on the off chance they might pay you?
You can rest assured of this as well: people will definitely submit to your contest--but none of them will be great designers, because all of them will be people who place the value of their work at somewhere around "maybe 500 dollars."
I figured that Tarsnap users had a head start on the "figuring out ideas and values" part, in that they generally know what Tarsnap is and how it works.
It's possible that I'll find that someone has a nice idea but a poor implementation and award them the $500 but go off to hire an artist to draw the idea better.
>You can rest assured of this as well: people will definitely submit to your contest--but none of them will be great designers, because all of them will be people who place the value of their work at somewhere around "maybe 500 dollars."
This would almost certainly be true if content participants had no connection to the business. In this case, participants my be considering their work to be pro-bono work with a value much greater $500.
But given that I have no idea what I want, I figure the more people I invite to provide ideas the better.
You can just do what Steve Jobs did with Next: pick a designer you like, and leave it entirely up to him.
Ironically not because Jobs didn't have ideas on what he wanted but because the designer insisted:
"I asked him if he would come up with a few options, and he said, 'No, I will solve your problem for you and you will pay me. You don’t have to use the solution. If you want options go talk to other people.'"
NeXT logo is plain awful. I know it comes with 47 page manual explaining why the cube should be rotated by 17 (?) degrees, what the colors mean and all that, but the simple fact is that it simply didn't match the sleek nature of NeXTs themselves.
Right, but the issue is that 99 out of 100 designers will do work for you and not get paid for it, while one will. There are some good links to thoughts about speculative work here: http://www.nospec.com/articles
The other thing that will happen is that the most credible submissions will come from places like Indonesia and Vietnam and Bulgaria. I wonder what freaks pro designers out more, concern over the wasted time of contest losers, or concern over the extent to which offshore piecework designers can drive the prices down for people like Colin who simply don't want the full 40-80 hour project.
Here is a piece of tar being snapped in half.. it just makes sense, you know you like it. You can have this one.. its yours.
If I were your designer-for-a-day, for 500 bucks i would do a few iterations once the concept is okayed to get it just right for you and give you all the svg / png / pdf or whatever other format you would like, and downscale to icon sizes etc.. but not until, in the immortal words of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP_GOoBPKfQ
(c/o mike monteiro;)
Is it about what you want, or about what best represents your product to your audience? e.g., you give the brief to a designer and they work from that.
Would you run a code contest to have a software product built?
By using a contest format and only offering $500 to the winner, you're significantly limiting the talent pool of designers. Designers who are good--and know that they are--probably wouldn't design a logo for a guaranteed $500, much less for an effectively random chance of payment.
Maybe you don't really care if it's a very good logo, or if you're collaborating with a professional who can walk you through the process of discovering what you want. (You do want something, trust me--you just won't know it for sure until you start rejecting the things you don't want.) And that's fine--it's your choice. If your business is doing fine without an awesome logo or a slick brand, then good job!
But if you really do want something professional, something that can be built out into a bigger brand, and something that someone put a lot of thought into, then this is the wrong way to go.
I wouldn't hold a contest for $500 for a developer to write a piece of code for me. Why would I do it for a logo?
Here is the idea I submitted, uses Deja Vu monospace for the font. The shape is a bolt, and I am trying to go for the idea of industrial strength and security.
This one is my favorite so far :) Very sleek. But I wish it distinguished "tar" and "snap" to give a subtle cue as to pronunciation. What if the "tar" part were set in a slightly heavier weight?
Thanks and an interesting idea, I can see where you're coming from. I have tried it with a bolder font on the tar, it does hint more as to how to pronounce it.
On the topic of brand, I always read "tarsnap" as "tarsnip" - like a parsnip.
I think I get the name (unix `tar` plus a snapshot or securely locked in). It's not lack of familiarity - I've known about it for years, and even have an account.
I doubt you're keen on a name change, but "tarlock" would avoid this.
I've wrote about this a few times on HN before. You guys like to downvote me every time I do but here we go again ...
Good designers, the ones you want if this is important to you, don't do contests. We have families to feed and bills to pay. "Winning" a popularity contest, not based on substance but instead on style, doesn't allow us to support ourself and our families doing our work. So, who are the designers doing these contests? Well, besides the large number of completely untrained laypeople, it's mostly students wanting beer money and portfolio pieces. And lets face it, most designers need many years beyond school before they're anything approaching "good" at their craft. Those years are spent doing grunt work with increasing amounts of responsibility under senior designers, art directors, creative directors, whatever.
My second point about that is how rare it is to win a contest. Designers know that they're often designing blind here. They could spend all the time in the world creating the perfect brand and the client could choose something else because they don't like the color blue or they're scared of clown logos or whatever. Point is, the client is often hardly objective in these situations and the designers know this. What does this mean in practicality? They are going to put as little effort as possible in to this because the chances of reward are small. Personally, I'd love to see the average amount of time spent on these logo entries. I bet most of them are well under 10 minutes.
Legal issues. I'll skim here because I don't have my links handy but most of these contest websites have been caught with stolen logos in their submissions. Companies have been sued for using these logos from contest websites costing them thousands of dollars they didn't expect. It happens and when the "designer" is some anonymous guy across the world, you have no recourse but to pay the fees, lawyer fees and then pay to do your logo all over again. Not to mention the embarrassment to your company when this happens. This stuff is very, very rare for clients working with designers face-to-face.
Lastly, when you're missing the face-to-face collaboration between designer and client, you're also missing most of what makes design "design", instead of art. The research as well as most of the creative process tends to go missing. The designer starts to view the client as the ones to design for instead of the "user" and as a result, the logo/brand/whatever becomes less effective. And you know what? A lot of important questions go missing ... like what are your plans for the future? What is your strategy to deal with your competitors? Even simple things like "am I making the logo for the company, the product or both" ... changes in company strategy are rarely mentioned in logo contests and this could be the most important question in the world. Logos need to be adaptable to company strategy and that strategy needs to be talking out between company and designer. Often NDAs are signed beforehand, good luck doing that with on a contest.
I've watched a bunch of my friends do 99designs contests and can back you up with the concern about stolen logos. In the contests I've run in the last couple years, I've tried to submit somewhat idiosyncratic briefs to constrain the possible logos. On the other hand, I'm betting you'll have a hard time naming a company that had to pay "thousands of dollars in lawyer fees" for buying what turned out to be a boosted logo. You just take the logo down and get a new one.
The rest of your comment, though --- what is Colin supposed to do with this? He doesn't want to buy face-to-face collaboration. He doesn't want to subsidize your whole industry. Have you seen his website? Suffice it to say that your profession has very little to with his company strategy. I doubt he cares how many minutes go into the design; the point of contracting the work out is that other people can do in 10 minutes something he couldn't do in a month.
So what it boils down to is, he's made a decision that a logo has $500 in business value to him. The process you're advocating, with the specific bells and whistles you're mentioning, starts at $5000. No sale. Could you instead give him some advice that involves a more effective use of $500?
> On the other hand, I'm betting you'll have a hard time naming a company that had to pay "thousands of dollars in lawyer fees" for buying what turned out to be a boosted logo. You just take the logo down and get a new one.
It doesn't exactly work like that. I wish I could find my notes right now, I have a half-written blog on copyright issues for clients that I did a bunch of research and found these cases. Anyway, you don't get to just say sorry and move on. You're liable for damages whether you knew about it or not. You can, of course, go after the designer if they're not outside your reach (international or hidden behind an anonymous online identity) but it's a real issue. As a designer, I have to know about this stuff because I can be sued if a client gives me something they don't have permission to use and I do. There are, of course, a number of issues that could effect the outcome including if the copyright is registered and if they're willing to go through the effort to go after you but it's a danger that shouldn't be ignored. (I am not a lawyer. I just have a healthy fear of them.)
> The process you're advocating, with the specific bells and whistles you're mentioning, starts at $5000. No sale. Could you instead give him some advice that involves a more effective use of $500?
Not always. My wife and I are both designers. Many of our friends are designers. We do a lot of on-the-side work with small budgets that would give a much better result for the same cost. Sometimes one of us will come home from doing something during our 9-5 for a huge multi-billion dollar corporation to do something for a 1 person startup. Often the startup has more interesting projects and are much nicer to work with. Plus, I don't have to wear a suit, a fake smile and get patted down by under-paid security when I go to meet the CEO of tiny-startup, llc. And as a bonus, most of you guys pay in less than 6 months without having to resubmit form 41824817B with the new PO number to the department that never answers their phones. (I hate corporate work.)
Would you care to cite a case where someone bought a logo on 99designs and was then sued for thousands of dollars in damages when that logo turned out to have been stolen? I couldn't find one. You'd think, if that had ever once actually happened, it would be easy to find.
I wish you and your wife the best. Believe it or not, I have very similar experiences working with startups! They reach out to us all the time for security work, and I'm always happy to talk to them; I like hearing about what they're doing. Most new startups are nowhere near ready to pay the going rate for software security assessments. When they get on the phone with me, I don't explain to them how they need to forget about buying that next server or renting their first office so they can make room in their budget for an assessment. I give them advice and point them to options for getting some kind of baseline coverage in advance of driving serious revenue through their system, at which point maybe it would make sense for an assessment.
My experience with all sorts of professional services practices mirrors this. Lawyers, for instance, will often do consults for free as a form of speculative work in anticipation of a client eventually being big enough to do real business with.
So... as a (perhaps inadvertent) spokesperson for your profession, why don't you tell us what someone like Colin should do in this situation? Hope he runs into a designer who will take his $500 and throw him a bone for the fun of it, as a change of pace from corporate work?
Then you should've not offered the $ reward. This motivates wrong kind of people and sure as hell it does not do much to motivate a "hacker with some design skills".
There are people who really need those $500 (think - 3rd world countries where this is a luxurious sum on money) and who will enter because they are desperate. Then he makes a face, flips a finger and says it wasn't good enough. Does it not stink to you even one bit?
Of course contestants realize that they aren't likely to win, but if he's doing the right thing by setting up a mud wrestling match? I personally think he's not, so I do give a fuck.
Why? Because money is evil? Because True Hackers don't "sell out"?
And so what if the 'wrong kind of people' start submitting designs. I bet the contest runners would be happier with an arsehole submitting a fantastic logo, than a lovely person submitting a crap one.
You probably spent more time writing this comment than it would have taken to design something simple for them.
I do agree that contests are shit and that we never take part in them. This contest is unique in that he doesn't want a designer as much as someone who 'get it' and doesn't need any direction.
Ok, I have to say this: there are too many people out there holding themselves out as designers, and truly good ones are very hard to find. I have spent thousands over the years on design I never used and have spent thousands more on items that were usable, but sub-optimal (i.e. I settled).
Portfolios aren't enough. Conversations aren't enough. And, the standard payment plans of a third up-front leaves the client holding the bag if the designer can't deliver. It comes down to whether the designer can understand what the client likes, add his/her experience, design principles, creativity, artistic ability, etc., then execute in a way that is compelling and professional. But, frequently you don't know if the designer can truly do this until you have committed and get that initial revision.
Here's how it goes: After the initial revision, you then give feedback and the designer begins to iterate, frequently getting further and further away. From there, it devolves into a frustrated designer who then puts the onus on the client to tell him/her exactly what he wants. This means the client is now effectively designing and the designer is just putting the pixels together in Photoshop. Game over. Of course the client doesn't know what he is doing or how it will look ("maybe if you move this over there" or similar is frequently heard). But, the designer then takes the position that "this is what you asked for."
I have seen some variation of this happen far too many times, and not just with my own projects. It seems to be the rule, and not the exception. The designer either gets it or not, and too many don't.
So, something needed to change about the process or otherwise, and I think that is the entire impetus behind these contests. Maybe they are not perfect and have their own downside, but they shift the risk squarely to the designers' side. Too much? I don't know. But, sites like 99designs are a market-based solution to a real pain experienced by clients in the design space. Think about that: It is not just price. It is the total experience and the risk profile on the client side.
If more designers were taking better care of their clients (as you may well be doing), I would have no interest in seeking such alternatives.
IMO, the designer is not to blame if the client keeps changing their mind about what they (or their spouse, nephew, neighbour or cat) like - which, believe it or not, happens.
I wanted to get away from castles and locks and such. You can check out the README if you want to know what my thought process was, but it should be distinctive and appealing without an explanation.
Note that the font is not free. From the fine print:
Use by more than 25 Users, or equivalent Website Visitors, is a breach of this Free Licence Agreement, and instead requires a commercial licence.
An then your logo is the very stylized face of a bulldog, looking straight on. The word tarsnap is set to the right of the dog face for the full logo. You can use the face by itself for the favicon etc.
I think the word 'snap' has a lot of dog connotation to me. A dog snapping at your heals. The dog snapping at the mailman. And a guard dog is a pretty good metaphor for your product. It keeps things safe and protected from the bad guys.
Also, to have a 'mascot' like logo fits in with the penguins, devils, ponies, etc. You can make it stylized to project a "serious, reliable" image, rather than cartoon like.
If you like my suggestion, take the $500, and hire my favorite designer, tywilkins.com. You get a much better result than me trying my hand. The problem with a $500 budget is you don't have a the time to explore a lot of options. At $100/hour, you just have 5 hours. But that might be enough time to draw an already fleshed out idea.
Considering Tarsnap doesn't have a GUI I'd suggest a text-only logo - something like Tarsnap_ for a full logo and then just T_ for social media icons/favicon/128x128.
I can put something together but at the end of the day it's just changing fonts until there's a winner.
Colin, if you're interested in the idea and there's a particular font/color you would like used let me know and I'll make the pngs for you. Don't stress about payment, it's quick and easy for me to do.
my thoughts exactly. In my very non-artistic, unimportant opinion, the last thing tarsnap needs is yet another logo with a padlock / key / chain / castle / fortress / shield / guard / dog.
These security-related icons are so frequently (ab)used that I'm getting a strong urge not to use any product that relies on them to symboloze its security.
the last thing tarsnap needs is yet another logo with a padlock / key / chain / castle / fortress / shield / guard / dog.
I'm inclined to agree... I'm not saying it's impossible to produce a good logo with one of these, but I'd need to see something really inspiring to put up with a cliche.
That's certainly an option. Whether that's the best option, I have no idea until I see what people come up with. :-)
But someone is going to get $500 (or $500 minus 99designs' cut), even if it's just someone who typesets "Tarsnap" is a way that I like more than anything else.
I suppose tarsnap is named like 'portsnap', which you also wrote, but what is the thought process behind calling that 'portsnap'? That might help stimulate some ideas and suggestions.
I am assuming it's not a piece of tar snapped in half. Although sometimes, having the FreeBSD ports system compile perl and python from scratch when I am trying to install emacs does make me want to snap it in half (yes, yes, I know I am not the model FreeBSD user, et cetera :))
tarsnap = TAR backups, in a SNAPshotted model (vs. incremental backups). I also liked the fact that it reminded FreeBSD users of portsnap, which is a very popular tool.
I understood the name immediately, but always considered it an awful name for most "normal" users. But, maybe UNIX culture will win in the end and "tar" will become a word everyone knows.
Tarsnap users almost always already know what tar is. The fact that tarsnap has a tar command line -- i.e., one they already know -- is a big deal for a lot of tarsnap users.
For what it's worth, I do know what 'tar' means -- I mostly use Linux (GNU/Linux if you're being pedantic), so the snap part was what I was asking about.
If you want similar backup capabilities to your own server, check out obnam or bup. Both do de-duplicated remote backups with differing tradeoffs and capabilities in security, efficiency, etc.
Here's my proposal, very simplistic and based on the inconsolata font (which is licensed under an Open Font license). Original artwork is SVG. http://imgur.com/SVOZTC6
I'm normally against the idea of spec work, but I think it makes sense for an open source project. People contribute code, sometimes even copy and graphics to open source projects, so what's the problem with crowd-sourcing a logo?
... basic idea was: "box" - not very original, but imho appropriate when thinking of storing things. as illustrated on the right, the form is the intersection of the shapes on the three visible faces of the box. the two in the front make up the "T" and on top is a very minimal "S". i thought of this intersection as a simple visual analogy of encryption.
wouldn't consider this a final logo - probably there could be done some more work on the details.
I have used tarsnap for a while now and id be willing to bet this hacker news post will get him more business than a well designed logo. Have you seen the site? It looks like ass. Didnt stop me from trying it great service btw.
Beastie leaning an elbow on a treasure chest, looking cool, as though it were a bar. Cool like he's taken down marauding hordes with his bare hands so keeping you away from that box isn't even a thing.
Design a logo contests are tacky. It reveals a lack of understanding of your own brand and it's bad marketing. Go out and hire a professional graphic designer.
By opening a contest, you're not only going to get a much lower quality of submissions, but in the end, the final decision is going to be made by you, someone "useless at anything artistic".
Paying a designer $500 won't get you a full brand identity makeover, but that's not what you're going for. You should be able to find a talented designer who will spend an hour discussing what you want to get our of your logo, some time going over a number of their own ideas, and then wrap up the project and give you the sizes you need and a vector file if you ever need to scale your logo up or down.