A little over a week ago (Saturday March 21st, 2009), I posted a 1 week competition to develop a new logo for a 'Real Time Search' engine that I am currently developing. The prize for this competition was set at $150 USD and would be awarded to the winning entry (only.)

The summary brief for this project follows...

Over the past 3 - 6 months, there has been an explosion in interest in 'social search'... more specifically 'right now' search or 'real time' search.
 
In essence, Real Time search is where the search engine provides search results from what people are saying 'now' about a particular topic as opposed to what was archived by a major search engine yesterday, last week or last month.

I wish to develop a simple (to start with) search engine providing real time search results for Australian users.

All up there were over 100 designs submitted from 31 different designers.
 
As per my previous post on this competition I was not only keen on finding a quick and affordable way to develop a logo for a new project I am developing in the 'Real Time Search' space (called appropriately enough, 'Real Time Search') but I was also keen to use so called 'crowd sourcing', the heir apparent to traditional outsourcing.
 
What was especially attractive about the particular service on offer from 99Designs (http://www.99designs.com) was how their model resolved what was for mine one of the inherent weaknesses of other 'crowd sourcing' models, most notably sites like eLance.

With eLance you post a project on the site and service providers bid for your work.
 
This usually means service providers from all over the world bid against each other to win the job. And by bidding against each other this often means one party undercutting another.
 
The winning service provider is most likely a combination of being cheap (sometimes the cheapest), has a good folio of past work completed, is well established and has good customer feedback.
 
While someone's folio of work, the price they quote you and their aggregated feedback score may point you in the direction of a particular provider, who's to say they will 'get' your particular job and create something as good for you as their previous work that helped you chose working with them in the first place...?
 
So the issue for mine with sites like eLance for creatively driven services, is that you may chose someone that on paper is perfect for what you require yet the work they end up doing for 'you' isn't what you were after.
 
Don't get me wrong, I think eLance is an exceptional resource for many services (and in fact I will be using eLance shortly for some web development) however I think it isn't a good fit for creatively driven services, ie Graphic Design.
 
99Designs' model (and others like it) is for service providers to provide design work for you on spec in a live competition where you, the competition owner can rate and provide feedback on designs developed for you in real time.
 
While admittedly this isn't an ideal process for designers (and there have been many posts from designers up in arms over these sorts of services) it works brilliantly for people requiring basic, easy to brief design work.
 
In my particular case I developed a basic brief and posted it to the 99Designs site Saturday March 21st, 2009.
 
The initial set of designs were very professionally developed but not 'on message'.
 
As the site allows for, I modified the brief to include more of my personal wants and don't wants for the competition. I also provided detailed feedback to the contest as a whole 'and' to individual designers on submitted designs both to weed out those that weren't appropriate and to hopefully have those designs that I liked, improved and re-submitted.
 
This particular part of the process is the knock out punch for these types of services and what really sets them apart from early crowd sourced sites operating in the space.
 
The quality of designs being submitted improved (in my opinion) markedly over the week of the competition as did their appropriateness vs the brief.
 
With 3 days to go I I had narrowed the process down to 3 designs from 3 different designers and was at that stage satisfied that with some further revisions, one of those 3 designs would go on to win the competition.
 
With only 48 hours to go, I had a flood on new designs submitted, including several by a 20 year old designer going by the name of Hagios whom would eventually go on to submit the winning entry (number 75 as shown below.)

All in all, an extremely positive experience and one which I am confident will be even more so with the next competition I post (and there will be many more.)