After recently reading The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris I decided to start my own little outsourcing experiment. I didn't have anything in mind at first, but then I thought about the logo for my own consulting company Dalton Technology - it was looking a little tired and I could do with something new. I would normally get my wife to do this as she is actually a graphic designer, but her being pregnant, tired and completely off this sort of work at the moment - I thought I would try one of Tim's recommendations - the site elance.com
Took me all of 2 minutes to post my project - entitled "logo for my consulting company" - very little additional information (I was feeling lazy and also wanted to test out how people responded to zero upfront information). Anyway - you can put these things out for open tender, but I didn't want to deal with all the emails so I just picked about 7 or 8 suppliers that I liked the portfolios styles of and let them bid it out. Bids ranged from about $50 - $300 for the job. The one I liked the most bid at about $180 and so I whittled it down to 3 that I liked and managed to price match them down to $150.
The winning bidders for my project were The Netmen - and once selected in elance, they sent me a short questionaire for me to fill in for my company. This was relatively painless and probably took me around 15 mins to fill in. It consisted of questions about my company, my business, the kinds of customers I have, corporate styles, colours, fonts and most importantly - which logos in the current portfolio I liked and which I disliked (and why).
Once this was returned - my first set of about 10 logos took about 3 days to get back to me. I didn't like any of them - so told them this and why, they were cool about it - completely normal I'm told. This happened a few times - until by about the 3rd batch of 10 they were getting nearer to what I liked. By the 4th set - I had chosed 2 I had liked, and by about logo number 43 I was happy. Anyway - without further ado - here it is:
An interesting experience. In total I reckon I spent about 2 hours of my time doing the back and forth stuff, and $150. Not a bad deal - and the whole process was a lot of fun.
ps. Yes - it looks like a Star Trek badge - this wasn't intentional - it was just how the D and the T morphed through the iterations.
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