Let me start by saying that creating a logo for an organization requires a combination of creative talent, business understanding, communications skill and craftsmanship. It is reasonable and typical for a company to pay thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars for a good corporate logo.
With that as a backdrop, we set out to test what you get when you use a competitive design exchange to create a logo for $195.
The purpose of this test is to explore the identity design options available to smaller, informal tribes.
Setup
Our test tribe for this exercise is a 4th grade club soccer team in California. Their league, LMYA Soccer, selects national team names for each club team, we are working with Netherlands. The uniform (jersey and shorts) will have the league logo, but the rest of the equipment will be decorated with the teams’ logo.
The Netherlands soccer logo looks like this:
Netherlands Soccer Jersey
The tribe is looking to customize:
Duffel Bags
T-shirts
Shorts
Sweatpants
Rubber wristbands
Fat rubber bands for their cleats
Team Banners
The logo and colors should derive from the Netherlands’ identity, but not copy it.
We expect that the logo will be applied as a heat-transfer, direct fabric print, dye-sublimation and embroidery. To work in all of these processes, it should be bold and clear without small details or small text. It will have to work in Black and white as well as in full color.
The Competition
We posted the design competition on 99designs.com. This site is the magnet for considerable criticism from the design community since it erodes the perceived value of proper design and design processes. We used them nonetheless since many of our tribes have $200 or less to spend on the creation of a new logo. For them it is 99designs(or equivalent), or clip art.
This is our second time using 99designs. Our first contest was for a patch design for Tribal iD. In that test, we received 79 entries from 13 designers.
The results of the first contest are available here.
The new, Netherlands Soccer competition kicked off at noon Pacific time on Thursday the 13th and lasts for 7 days. We generated a design brief using 99desings form and we filled it out as we thought a typical small, informal, tribe member might.
You can see our brief here.
Based on our earlier experience, we expect to start seeing entries within a day or two.
As the entries are submitted we have an opportunity to rate them and provide written feedback to the designers. Last time we were diligent about providing immediate feedback. As a result, the designers began to imitate the better rated submissions and the contest lost creativity. This time we will respond to each designer privately and hold off rating the designs for a few days.
We will post updates over the next few days as submissions come in.
Update 1 (Day 2):
We received 4 design submissions so far. The first three look good. Our comments to the designers were that they are strong submissions, but a little severe for a young girls’ team.
Design submissions Day 2
Update Day 3:
Four more designs. Two of them are iterations (and improvements) on earlier designs. Two are new.
All four are pretty good, but we still like the golden lion images best. The more colorful versions look too much like other soccer logos we have seen. If the contest ended today, we would be pleased with either of the oval lion designs.
Logo Submissions Day 3
Upadate Day 4:
Eight more submissions were uploaded today. These are significantly different from the earlier designs. All use the Netherland’s yellow, and all focus on the lion head. The designs by Jorge have a looser style. Our preference is still for the earlier designs.
Logos Day 4
Final Entries:
The last two entries come from Gui, one of the earlier entrants. Gui, it turns out, is from Italy.
At the end of our last contest, we felt badly about the designers who did work and did not win, so we offered to make each of them a t-shirt for free.
We were surprised when we ended up sending shirts to Indonesia and Serbia.
Runner Up
The Winner!!
