Posted July 19, 2010 by four94 Test in Branding, Logo Design. Tagged: 99Designs, Branding, Logo. 17 Comments

Our first order of business – – Establish an identity and brand for our company. The first part was easy. We quickly came to an agreement on our name – Four94. This made the most sense since the company was started by four people who are all connected by Chicago’s I-94. Next up – – agree on our company logo. Some would criticize us for wanting a logo even before having a fully defined product to sell, but we wanted to begin marketing ourselves and getting feedback from companies on how we could help improve efficiencies for our potential customers.

While we consider ourselves a creative group, we are the first to admit graphic design is not one of our strengths. And as a new company, we wanted to stay as lean as possible, while doing all the essentials to build a successful business. To us, that meant not adding staff for one-off projects and not spending $2,000 when $200 will do.

Enter 99Designs. 99Designs is a website that gives businesses an opportunity to post a project request for things like a new logo or website design. With a new project posted, freelance designers submit designs and compete against one another to earn a monetary prize of your designation. In the event you don’t like any of the submitted designs, you can get a full refund (just don’t guarantee the prize).

They have a variety of pricing levels or custom packages for you to choose from, and they estimate the amount of designs you will get based on that. When we launched our project, the budget plan they offered was $211 for an expected 35 designs, although prices have gone up a bit since then. With this package, the winning designer would earn $150, while the rest of the money went to 99Designs for processing. How could we go wrong? We were confident there would be at least one design we’d all agree upon from the estimated 35 design submissions. So, at 99Designs recommendation, we set out to be as descriptive as possible in our project brief explaining who we are and what we were looking for in a logo.

And so it began…

Day 1: We launched our project and within 24 hours we had our first 5 designs. The quality of designs were pretty good. And with the added ability to rate each design and leave feedback to offer areas of improvement for each submission. Logo #1 (pictured below) stands out as the favorite after the first round of submissions.

Day 2: We’ve already hit the 35 design mark! This appears to already be paying off! But, we notice this can be quite a bit of work if we leave feedback for each and every designer.

Day 3: 50 designs – – much more than 99Designs estimated we would get. Now we notice that a lot of the designs share the same qualities as the earlier designs with higher ratings. So, a piece of advice, offer private feedback to each designer otherwise you will see diminishing returns on creativity. Oddly enough, the group still favors the very first logo created, but there are other players in the game now.

Day 4: 85 logos – – we are pleasantly surprised! We are getting some pretty gnarly looking logos though. Some look like graffiti, others look like they were done in Microsoft Word. Let’s hope things pick up.

Day 5: 150 LOGOS!!! Now we realize that leaving personal feedback is no longer an option, so we resort to a quick star rating system from this point forward. This process has become pretty stressful because there are a good number of quality logos to choose from that only show slight variation. One thing noticed from our daily vote is our preference for the color green…Hmmmm.

Day 6: Now up to 180 logos – – time to begin a mass elimination process so we can focus on a select few. Chosen will be the top 5 that have been showing up consistently in everyone’s daily vote.

Day 7: We are 2 hours away from having to make our choice and there are currently 182 designs for an average of $1.16 per design!! Not a single designer in the world would be willing to work for that output. Overall, we feel this has been a good experience and investment on our part.

The group is all casting their final votes for their top 3-4 logos and making one last pitch for their favorite. Help us decide, cast your vote in the comments section at the top. We’ll post our final decision in the coming week… Stay tuned!

Contest Link: http://99designs.com/logo-design/contests/create-identity-saas-company-logo-four-48613



