Do crowdsourced design contests work? You be the judge – and win!

October 4th, 2010 by

Microtask t shirtNothing beats first-hand experience. Put your money where your mouth is. What doesn’t kill you will only make you stronger. Or so everyone always says.

A few weeks ago we discussed the use of crowdsourcing in design contests. Writing this blog – and reading the feedback we received in response to it – got us thinking. Why not try it out for ourselves? After all, we wanted to design a Microtask T-shirt, and crowdsourcing has made running design competitions easier than ever before.

Crowdsourcing the shirt on my back
Because we focused on 99Designs in this earlier post, it was a natural choice to run the competition. Having said this, based on our initial research, Crowdspring, designoutpost, designcrowd, MycroBurst, designcontest, and redesignme all seem to offer a great service as well.

This decision out of the way, the first step is to create the challenge, decide on a prize and provide a design brief.

As we had a clear vision of what we wanted, we were able to provide competitors with very detailed, specific instructions relating to things like colors. We also gave them various images of our brand identity and some background information about Microtask. We offered a prize of US$300.

From beginning to end, the process was fascinating.

For a start, 99Designs offers an extremely professional, well-oiled service. Creating the challenge, pre-payment and the other practical details could not have been easier. We were most impressed.

Unfortunately, from this point, things did not run quite as smoothly.

Distributing work: no easy task
As a person who commented on our earlier blog pointed out, the process does not end with the posting of the competition. You do not just “sit back and relax.” A lot of feedback and additional guidance is also required.

For us, this mainly involved either re-stating aspects of the initial instructions (over and over and over again), or encouraging competitors to come up with something more creative than simply collages of the images that we had given them.

By the close of the competition we had received 130 designs from about 40 artists. This was considerably more than 99Designs promised. The downside was that the far majority of these were either terrible – in that they completely ignored the design brief – or almost identical to the few designs which were actually decent.

Despite this, overall we are happy with the winning design, pictured above, and are not about to chase 99Designs for its money-back guarantee.

Taking what we have learned, we believe that next time – with a bit of luck – the process could be even more successful. For example we would make the instructions extremely clear and as short as possible, taking into account that the designers do not seem to spend too much time reading them. We might also experiment with a competition where the designers cannot see each other’s work.

At this point, however, what we would really like to know is: What do you think of the design? Do you think it is worth $300? Have you had any experience with crowdsourcing creative work? Do you have any ideas how we could do it better next time? Finally, can you think of any way that the Microtask system could distribute creative work in a more efficient way?

Please post your thoughts as comments. The best five will win… you guessed it… a one-way ticket to Finland! Ok, not really. You’ll win the highly original, crowdsourced, newer than new, Microtask T-shirt! (Which we expect you to wear EVERY single time you leave the house, regardless of whether you actually like it).

For a better look at the t-shirt, click HERE.

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  • http://twitter.com/trinta Tuomas Rinta
  • Pedro99

    It looks nice… :-)

  • http://www.bodybyneglect.com David

    I’ve used 99designs for two projects. I think I paid too much not realizing what incentives would work. Most of the designs seemed to leverage other popular designs or copies of existing work on the web passed off as original. For my bodybyneglect.com T-Shirt I came up with a great logo. Chanceinmypants.com was simple but cute. Both – in the end are pretty original.

  • Johngreatguy99

    I think this process is fascinating. I like the design, but I wonder what results you would have got if you had spent the money on a traditional design firm?

    In terms of efficiency, it seems like there was a lot of wasted effort both by you and the failed designers. I suppose this is much the same debate that traditional design contests have been having for a long time. Is crowdsourced design a traditional design comp on steroids, or is it something new?

  • http://www.computerbooksonline.com CBO

    Love the T-shirt, but $300 seems a bit much. Of course, by offering $300, you aren’t limited to one person or one firm’s ideas, which you may or may not like, but won’t really know until after the fact. nnI have toyed with the idea of using crowd sourcing for some design work. I think that if I did, I would go with the sites that don’t allow the designers to see each other’s work, because they do seem to copy each other.

  • Strangeronthebus

    I am currently working on a dissertation proposal looking into crowdsourcing from a corporate comms perspective, so your comments around what you would do differently are useful. What’s also interesting is the fact that it’s a strategy, contrary to popular opinion, that does not always provide value for money, especially if you consider time your staff spend responding to questions. nIn researching the differences between definitions of Open source and Crowdsource, Open source participants can always see other participants contributions, and Crowdsourcing seems to vary depending on the organisation initiating the request. I would expect a good agency to provide pros and cons to help you select a strategy that is right for you. Did that happen?

  • Harry Seppala

    In our case we chose to show all the entries to all the participants. Actually in 99designs it’s offered as an option to hide entries from other participants. However choosing that option would have costed around 100$ (if I recall right). 99Designs promoted choosing the 100$ option because they considered that it raises the quality of the entries.nnThen again it was slightly surprising that many participants ended-up copying other participants ideas, especially after they were commented to be good..

  • Em_dash

    Every time a someone submits a design to a company that is crowdsourcing ideas, a puppy dies.

  • Parkbench

    No, honestly I do not want to win that t-shirt (I use a small, if you insist) but it made me think of my very old black t-shirt bought 20 years ago in a shop selling used books. On the front a foto (white on black background) of Kafka saying: “Kafka havde det heller ikke for morsomt” (which means something like “Kafka did not have much fun, either”) and on the rear of the t-shirt “Nansensgade Antikvariat – A book a day keeps reality away!”. What I mean is, it is not so much the design which is important, but a message, that makes you laugh, think and remember it forever.

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