Guide To Creating A Successful Logo Contest on Digital Point Forums

Creating a logo contest is a very simply idea. If you need a logo or header graphic you can have one designed for you quickly and cheaply by creating a thread in a forum of graphic designers and offering prize money to whoever enters the best logo.

The contests section on Digital Point Forums is where I recommend doing this.

If you’ve never started a logo contest and you are in need cheap good looking logos then it’s something I highly recommend (unless you can make them yourself or decide you want to learn that skill of course). Looking down the Digital Point contest forum there many contest holders offing similar prize money but some contests seem to get more and better quality entries than others despite the same prize money on offer. Why? Because some of the contest holders don’t give enough information in their description for what they are looking for.

Essential Instructions to Include in Your Logo Contest:

• Size of the image in Pixels (e.g. 925 x 150)
• What it needs to say. Clarify whether you want some bigger writing as a title and smaller writing as a slogan.
• The style you want.

You may have no idea of what you would call the style you are imagining or you may not even be imagining a style, but if you are launching a new blog (or re-designing an old one) you must have a good idea of what kind of readers your blog will cater too.

A few questions to think about when describing what style you want

• Should it have a modern and slick cutting-edge look?
• Should it be big and fun or more serious?
• Should it contain images and if so what of?

I also find it useful to say something like “feel free to be creative”, which helps designers not worry about you thinking their design is wacky and also encourages more to take part as its more fun for them if they feel free to be creative with their work.

The one vital piece of information to go in in the title of your contest is how much money you are offering as prize money or you will find yourself with considerably less designers even visiting your contest page at all, yet alone entering a design.

If the rest of your site is set up in terms of colour schemes then you can provide a link to it in the contest and ask for the colours to match those already on the site.

It’s easy to feel like the longer instructions you write the less entries you get, but it its about quality not quantity. If someone cant be bothered to read your instructions they probably wont take much time over the logo.

If you don’t want to wait forever (who does!) then something like “quick entries greatly appreciated!” in the content of your post is effective. It’s not worth playing games saying “need urgently contest will close in 24 hours” to try and push designers to enter your contest, it doesn’t work.

Generally speaking if you follow these instructions and offer a reasonable amount of prize money you are pretty much guaranteed to get entries. Wait at a few hours (roughly 5 hours) before considering bumping your thread as it takes time for designs to be completed and getting away with more than one bump without penalization is pretty lucky.

Ask that entries into your contest are posted openly in the forum thread so everyone can see each others designs and the feedback you provide to each. Give feedback to every entry, (even if you are sure you won’t use it) so that everyone can learn from each other to gain clearer idea of what you want. Always be friendly with positives and negatives included in your critique (or at least a “thank you for your entry”). There are plenty of other contests the designer could enter and so it’s all about making them feel inclined to enter yours.

Good luck with your logo contest!