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?
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?