I was in the market for a new logo for my consulting business, and I talked to a friend of mine who is a creative design director to get an idea of how much it might cost. Holy cow… it was a lot more that I had imagined given that I’m a one-person shop. Then I realized (thankfully) that my friend, Brad, deals with big companies with big budgets. My budget was similar, but with a couple of zeros taken out.
So what’s an entrepreneur to do? I turned to crowd-sourcing. And what an amazing experience it turned out to be.
Here’s how I got started – primitive, but effective — I googled a couple of websites and looked over what they had to offer, but one caught my eye because the price was right and the turnaround was great – http://www.logodesignguru.com/.
Now, I really hadn’t heard of them before, but I did notice that a couple of businesses that I thought were pretty reputable had ‘liked’ them on their Facebook pages, so that provided some credibility.
I created an account, named the price that I was willing to pay, completed a design brief, and within a day, I had 4 different designs to look at, and within 5 days, I had 40 different designs. It was great! What was nice about having them trickle in was that I could add my comments about what I liked and didn’t like about the posted designs, so those designers could make tweaks and other designers could have more direction about my preferences.
What was fun was waking up every morning and having new designs to review. It was fairly easy to choose the final one because, like looking for houses, ‘you just know.’
After narrowing it down to one design, I was also able to talk directly with the designer and ask for more specific things like a black and white version and a version with a different tagline, etc. And all of this took only 14 days (you see new designs for 7 days, and then you take the next 7 days to narrow it down to one design).
Bottom line: it was fast, easy, fairly priced and offered a wide array of designs to choose from. And it was fun.
So, check out my new logo and tell me what you think. It’s in the header section of my website: http://CavanaghConsulting.com. I’d love to hear your comments.