Recently I’ve noticed a few people I know begin to share logo design comps on Facebook or Twitter, asking for their colleagues’ input and feedback. Upon further research, I discovered that they were using a “design service” that employs a contest of sorts. Professionally, I deplore design contests entirely. 
I recently read an article here, that very clearly spelled out the problems of using a contest to arrive at a new logo design for a business or organization. I loved it so much, I felt I would share it here on my blog. I welcome your comments below, after reading the following thoughts from Claudia Winifred.
Thanks to the internet, small businesses today have access to online guides and resources to better promote their businesses, products and services. This made small businesses realize the importance of brand development and marketing plan. A logo design is one of the most important steps towards an effective marketing plan and a sustainable brand development.
It costs money and time to create a marketing plan and spend your resources on the promotion of your business and products. Many small businesses have very limited budget for marketing their products and services. So, they decide to pursue an approach where they can get more benefits by spending less resources, money and time. Internet is a huge a marketplace, there are lots of people selling really bad products and services for very low prices. This makes small business owners believe that they can find shortcuts and special deals to get their work done.
One of such shortcuts is to get your logo design by organizing a contest on the so called design contest websites. Before we come to the point that why it is not a good idea to get your business logo designs from these contest portals, let us first discuss how these design contest websites work.
These design contest websites advertise themselves as crowd sourcing marketplace. Crowd sourcing is a practice where a job is posted and anyone can participate in that job by agreeing that it depends on the choice of the job poster whether or not they pay them for the work they have done. Design contest websites work on the same philosophy; you post your logo contest and set a prize for it. Then the designers on these websites respond to your announcement by sending you a finished logo design for review. You only pay the logo that you like the best.
This may sound very intriguing to you, after all you are getting so many designs and you only have to pay for the one. But if you are a smart business owner, then you must be wondering what the catch is?
Why it is bad for your business:
Most of these logo designers are from the developing countries in South Asia, China, Africa and Eastern Europe. So they do not understand the cultural, artistic, trendy, and design needs of businesses located in North America and Western Europe.
Since they work on designs where there is no guarantee of payment, they are not expected to provide you very high quality results. In fact in order to earn a decent living they must submit several designs per day and hope for the payment. Which means the work you get is of very low quality.
In order to quickly create new logo designs, these logo design artists carelessly copy the ideas from other logo designs. This makes your logo design not so unique and original. Since a logo design acts as your business and brand identity it needs to be unique and custom made for your business. A logo design which does not fulfill these requirements is actually pointless for your business needs.
There are many legal issues involved in contest designs. For example, the terms of your agreement on these design portals clearly state that neither the portal nor the designer will be held responsible for any damages that may occur to you and your business. So if a designer steals someone else’s logo and they sue you for using their brand identity in your logo then there is no way for you to catch this logo designer and ask him to pay for the damages.
Conclusion:
Everything that glitters is not gold, so instead of hiring crowds to experiment with your business, the smart idea would be to hire a professional and responsible logo design company.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/4462307
