Running a design contest pt.1 – Review of the OLP
// April 1st, 2008 // 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.
