Get creative

I'm working on a new start-up and one of the "to do" items was create a logo for our new company. The typical path is to find a graphics artist, hope they're good for you, pay them some money, they generate some samples and you go from there. It's hit or miss.

I stumbled upon CrowdSpring, a sort of Ebay for creative projects. You basically post your creative need, commit to spending a set amount of money, set the time period you want it and sit back and let people try to win your bid. My colleagues, all experienced marketing professionals, initially scoffed at this idea but lacking a better idea themselves agreed to give it a try.

We wrote up a basic project description of our company and logo needs, put an award amount of $250 and a time period of 7 days and begain the wait process.  In less than 24 hours, a few designers had submitted samples. A few were horrid, a few OK, but a few held promise. There was hope.

You can rate and comment on the samples provided as well as continue to update your project description during the bidding period. We did and the designers all seemed to respond quickly to our input.

At the end of 7 days, we had about 60+ samples and one was almost what we wanted. We awarded the project to the designer and asked if he would make some minor modifications. He immediately complied and in the end we got a professional package of our new logo in varous formats for both PC and Mac. As a final step, we rated our designer for his work and responsiveness.

Turns out our designer was in India and I'm not sure whether he slept or not, because no matter the time, if we had a question, he seemed to respond in a matter of hours. Needless to say, my marketing colleagues were surprisingly impressed such that we're looking now to use CrowdSpring for other graphic projects as well.