The online portfolio of Adam Fletcher an Internet Marketer, Blogger, Traveller, Writer (aspiring) and EntrepreNerd living in Leipzig, Germany.
// April 5th, 2008 // Comments // Spreadshirt, Virtual Community
I ended up blogging the whole internal project review for the OLP, so theres no need to do a part 2 here. For those interested you can find it over on the OLP blog
// April 1st, 2008 // Comments // Articles/Features, Spreadshirt
So the OLP is now over and it turned out to be a real hoot. Really good fun, the designers liked it and produced some brilliant stuff. I was pretty apprehensive when agreeing to run the Open Logo Project 1.6, as after nearly two years of writing and studying design contests I was finally going to have to run one 
I tried a few different things I’d wanted to see in the big design contest sites for a while, here I’ll tell you how and if they worked.
If you missed my earlier posts the OLP is Open Logo Project 1.6 its a contest to design Spreadshirt’s (my employers) new logo. Although its logo, not tshirt design, the basics are pretty much the same there is just a clearer brief. You can find out more about the contest in its About area, it started end of August and closed on Oct 14th.
Top level stats:
- 2,000 registered designers from over 45 countries
- 2,800 entries
- 6,000 uniques at peak
- 3,000 uniques a day average
- 8 weeks in duration.
The 15 grand finalists are here. The two winners were
Here is how we tried to make it different to other design contests and whether the things we tried worked or not:
This could turn into a long post so i’ll take the first few and talk about them some more, the rest I can tackle in another part.1) We wanted to reward more than just the winner = Along with 1,2 & 3 we have 10 different awards and prizes given by us and the panel. More on the panel later. Result: Mixed
I’ve been a planning a “our design contest exploitation?” series of posts for a long time, I’ll get there one day. But I know groups like No Spec! are heavily against speculative work like design contests. I expected when we began to promote the contest that we’d come under fire for exploiting designers, it happen a few times, theres a nice discussion in the Josh Spear comments section of their post about it. So while only one design could win the super grand prize and become our new logo, lots of other people would help on the way. So we added 5 special prizes and a 2nd and 3rd prize (we also ended up giving out a fourth). Here are a few of the special prizes:
The Community Award – In which you can win a whole years worth of shirts from la Fraise for someone who contributes positively to the community.
The Innovativeness Prize – For someone who really pushes the envelope and makes something remarkable. An early front-runner is Bean and whole new alphabet he created for us.
The Collaboration Prize – I’ll talk more about this later, but this prize is purely for design teams.
All in all, the prize kitty was a very respectable €15k!
This has worked pretty well, it was a confusing message but the variety or prizes help promote the contest in different circle, like the la Fraise prize in the t’osphere, the Innovativeness prize (which is Frank Pillers prize and an entirely custom outfit) in Mass Customization circles.
I think most people still think only in terms of 1,2 and 3rd, but I think this area has come into its own at the end of the contest. Those people who don’t win the big stuff might get an unexpected bonus and we get the chance to give prizes to the people that made the contest fun and helped others, instead of creating the greatest art.
Its inevitable that there is some negativity at the end of a contest. Logos are directly comparable in a way that t-shirts designs aren’t. In total we had 2,000 registered designers and 2,800 submissions. Thats a lot of people that didn’t win. Revealing the panel prizes slowly at the end of the contest can distract and also take some of the sting out of not winning the big stuff.
2) We wanted to give the winner exposure = Along with a Macbookpro and €3,000 cash the winner will get recognition that you can’t buy, their photo and an interview in Computer Arts magazine, an interview on Computerlove and a permanent thank you page @Spreadshirt. Result: Great!
This part worked brilliantly. We’ve had over 100 blog posts written about the contest. I think the main reason it spread so well is because of the Computer Arts co-operation. In total over 45 countries had a submitter to the OLP. Its really spread all over the place, way outside of the countries spreadshirt ships to. I think one of the main reasons are the prizes that money can’t buy like the half page interview with the winner that will be in the Christmas Computer Arts logo special.
I’ve also interviewed every winner here to try and give more exposure to their portfolio http://olp.spreadshirt.net/finalists/category/finalists/
3) Having an expert panel. Result: Mixed
We manage to get some great experts on the panel. In the end Scott Hansen (ISO50), Frank Piller, Christophe Martin (founder of Computerlove), la Fraise, and international branding agency Branded agreed to take part. Again this helped to promote the contest as we all pushed it, and each other in our channels. The downside of getting high profile people like this is that they all have time commitments which don’t always make it easy to get the level of involvement that you would like. Their opinions on the best logos are also not always in keeping with ours.
I would have a panel again if I restarted, but I’d look at a way of promoting people from within the community to panel status based on their opinions and involvement in the contest so the panel is dynamic based on activity. I would also make sure I had features written with each panel member before the start of the contest and use these occasionally throughout the contests duration.
4) I wanted people to discuss not give a score and leave. Result: Mixed
Votings nice, its an effective way of sorting designs and gives people a way to be involved even if they aren’t fluent in english. Without it people are more likely to comment and discuss what they like and don’t like. Voting can become the sole focus of the contest looking at whats popular, and make of break the design. We decided to skip voting all together, but allow commenting. Some of the most popular designs have 40 or so comments, which is great but I wouldn’t say we have as many comments as I would like (around 5000 or so). I guess for a t-shirt design site voting makes a lot more sense, as the voters will use the end product, where as only we (Spreadshirt) will use this end product.
More to come in the next parts of this series.
// April 20th, 2007 // Comments // Spreadshirt
I think the thing I was most surprised about when I joined Spreadshirt and worked a day in production (all employee’s work in production from time to time to see the other side of the process), is just how detailed, complicated and well…human the process is. I sort of naively assumed there was a big T shaped machine and you pressed a big green button and a tshirt popped out, if it gets jammed to press a red button and an umpa lumper would come and fix it.
To show the real process a little more we made this video. The amount of skilled human labour involved is really impressive and we just couldn’t get it all in.
I’ve never made a video before, infact I’m one of the few people I know who never loses huge portions of their day watching online video’s. For that reason I will a little unsure about taking on this project, luckily the people that helped us had. That left my role as standing around eating and attempting to look important, while the people with actual talent handled the filming part. It turned out to be a lot of fun, which was nice.
// August 18th, 2006 // Comments // Articles/Features, Spreadshirt, T-shirts, Threadless, Virtual Community
Whats the future of the design contest format? Its a crowded market place these days, one company that I think could make it interesting again is Spreadshirt.
The Draw from spreadshirt looks intruiging and hints at a wider push towards design contests in the future. This is also the first venture I’ve seen under both the spreadshirt and la fraise banners. I thought that spreadshirt might rebrand La Fraise but I think it’s a smart move that they haven’t, after all the have different target markets and La Fraise has a great rep in its market space. I think this design contest (and I dont know how its going to run so I could be way off the mark with this) could be an evolution in the format because of spreadshirts one-off production capabilities. The design contest is an attractive format because:
1. It attracts community by offering involvement and discussion (you know my thoughts on community, if not read the community is king series here)
2. It reduces the risk for the host company, the voting allows you to see the popularity of a product before you’ve gone to the trouble of printed a thousand examples of it that you now have to try and offload. Threadless from years of experience and sales data can probably forecast better than anyone the likely interest in a design and configure production to match. Its a much safer investment to spend thousands of $’s on a run of t-shirts if hundreds of people have said its great.
Spreadshirts model is different, they own now own not only the format in La Fraise but the production as well (in spreadshirt) providing them with profit from producing one-off t-shirts.
Wheres the part where this gets interesting? Now…
Spreadshirts design contests can follow a different format. Take Threadless’ for example – like a design that was submitted? It didnt win? Oh dear, better wait for it to come to Yabbos or something. Â
Spreadshirt on the other hand could build a store around every competition and although there are winning designs and the winner gets the £ and kudos why not offer every design for purchase? Write into the TOCs that every design submitted will be offered for sale (probably after the competition is closed) and that the creator will recieve x £’s per sale. The competition is still an interesting format, everyone that submits a design stand a chance to win but also make some £ in the process even if they dont win.
The only potential problem would be in deciding ownership of the rights to that design with it creator. The Threadless approach might work, by submitting a design you grant us the rights to sell it on La Fraise/Spreadshirt for 90days (with the creator receiving % of sale) after that period you have the right to request the removal of the design, at which time full copyright is returned to the creator.
Oh well I guess we’ll see soon enough…
