Crowdsourcing your Logo

An interesting phenomenon that has taken off over the last few years is crowdsourcing. The concept is really cool and it really does take advantage of the fact that two heads are better than one, or possibly thousands or millions of heads are better than one. The way it works is pretty cool. You as a consumer need something and you're going to depend on strangers to build, design, or create it for you. And you can potentially get the results you are looking for at an extremely affordable price.

I recently found this interesting article. You know that famous twitter bird? Well, apparently Twitter only paid approximately $6 for the design. Check it out:  http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/03/twitter-designe/

I'd like to have a new logo created for my business and am I'm thinking of posting my logo request to a crowdsourcing site. Has anyone ever participated in one of these sites? I'd love to hear about your experience and what you believe to be the benefits of doing business through crowdsourcing.

You can visit Digitalpoint Forums to find cheap logo, header and banner designers for even under $5! They sometimes offer logo+header+banner packages for under $10. I have never hired any of the providers over there but you can see their porfolio. Some of them do a decent job for the price you pay but again you get what you pay for. If you have a logo concept you can give them a try and see what they are going to come up with. At the end you are going to lose only $5 if you don't like their work.

I had 4 different logo options created thru LinkTogether.com recently (which is also run by Network Solutions, I think). We got about 15 bids for the work, ended up picking a designer in Australia, and he got the designs turned around in 24 hours for a very reasonable price. The client was delighted with the quality of the work! The logos were absolutely a unique custom design - no picking bits and pieces of existing art and it didn't cost a lot. So crowdsourcing is nice, but sometimes just picking the right designer works too. I'll use the guy in Australia again!