1) studying the niche, theme and style. We learn about your niche, see it’s main points and according to that we think of the concepts and ideas. It is also good when customer gives some samples of logos that he likes and expects to receive. That helps to understand better what the customer requires. And we all know that each customer is different so giving examples of logos he likes is a huge advantage for him too. Remember: it is not to copy the logo, it is just to make a professional logo that is closer to what the customers needs.

2) doing a lot of rough logo sketches on paper. Regarding to the given logo examples and studies of the niche, the work on a paper begins and a lot of rough sketches are made on it. That helps to come up with different ideas and when there is at least 1 very good concept, it is developed further untill it looks good.

3) digital logotype version is made with some more slightly different versions. The experiments do not end on the paper. During the digital professional logo version creation, the logotype is modified again and the games with the colors, positioning and shapes begin. The number of combinations can be enormous but it will keep enormous if the designers have no taste. So after some tests, the final logo is sent to the customer

4) customer’s reply:
a) the client is happy with the design and requires no changes
b) comments the logo and we do changes until he is happy with the logo. Usually it’s 1 and sometimes – 3 revision rounds.
c) if the client does not like the design, we repeat the process again and do our best again

So basically the logo that the client receives is a result of lots of work.
Even if the logo looks very simple, there is some hidden work that the
customer might not see. So it is important that you understand the work involved in the professional logo that you get – you are not paying for nothing.

99designs – very many contests running at the same time, that’s over 600! The count of contest hints that there are really many designers – over 30.000. The contest winners are highly awarded. That’s from $150 to $1000 or even more. And most of contests are guaranteed (that means a winner will be chosen for sure). There are really many talented designers to compete with but you can also find a contest which you may feel that you can win! I mean you see the designs submitted and think for yourself if you can beat them. Quite a good strategy for newcomers. You can also browse through folios of the best designers there and see their work. Most of them are really impressive that make you say “Wow” automatically.

logomarket – logos shop with extremely high prices, mostly they are 300€ or even 1000€. Does it sound attractive to sell a logo for such a price? For me it does, but there is one thing – you have to pay one time fee and it’s 75€. But you get profit from your first illustrator logo sale. Actually the competition is quite big because there are really many submitted logos, but it is worth a try I think. So if you decide to join this site, don’t give up too early.

DigitalPoint forum – register to this forum and enter this link. There are quite many running contest at the time. The rewards aren’t that big (~$15-$150) and running time of one contest varies from one day to a week or so. But the rivalry isn’t that big. Many entries are made unprofessionaly and not chosen by contest holders, so you have a great chance to win if you have some skills and talents! Some of the contests holders do not choose a winner but I wish you good luck to make an impression to them and choose your design!
By visiting this link you can make your own thread where you can offer your design services. You will get customers for sure even if your designs aren’t that professional, but your prices shouldn’t be too high then. All I can tell you this is a guaranteed income. There are really many people who need design servies.

DesignContest.net – this website/forum holds good rewarding contests. They give like $150-$500 (mostly over $200) to the winners. The designs provided are quite professional because they have to see your folio and you must be at least 18 years old man to create an account there. If that’s not a problem, then you really should join this site. There aren’t so many designers to compete with, so your chances are quite huge to win this kind amount of money. The money for a contest is paid to site admin and then he pays for the winner so there can be no scams or so. The key is: make a good design and win the money!

BrandStack – again, a good website where you can upload brands and wait untill someone buys it. But unlike logomarket, you don’t have to pay any joining fee. The prices are really high here, so you can profit from this site easily. There are even over $3000 costing brands that are quite simple at the first look, so I think it’s a chance that you shouldn’t miss, upload and earn! For the buyers, you can find great and creative brands that will meet your needs, company, expectations.

Elance – a great and with wide community website where you can post a job or be a provider and submit proposal for a job and get some work. You have to pass a test if you want to be a provider. That means you have to know the rules, TOS, how the website works and so on. There is also a place for your portfolio where you can show your works. The rewards for works are good. There are many designers who have made from $1000 to $50000 and even more (Lifetime earnings). This website has so many features to list so you should see them on your own. Have a great stay there!

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Ok, we might stop here for a second. Please, don’t try to rotate the “OGC” logo by 90 degrees.

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Tip: set a smart prize

If your contest is on a website where designers can arrange contests let’s say by a reward. Then the highest paid contest are on the top and the lowest on the bottom. So, if you decide to pay $300 for a winner then you should make it be $301 because your site will be above all those $300 then. This way your contest will attract more designers than it could if it was $300 worth contest and was among other $300 paying contests. Look at this image, it is just a good example of what I have in mind:

As you see there are several contests with $300 prize and one with $303 is on the top. It absolutely gets more attention from designer than those below it.

Tip: leave comments carefully not to stop unique designs incoming

Then, you should know that giving one direction for a particular designer will have quite not a good response for you. Yes, that designer may get something better but other man will follow him. They will apply your suggestion on their designs and you will get less very unique designs submitted. You may send that designer a private message if you want him to change anything in his design or do it in other way but it should be done privately. It also isn’t a good idea to leave participants with no response from you. They will quit the contest or just stop submitting new designs and wait till you show up or even choose the winner. You have to show up from time to time and maybe leave a general message for all contestants that you are still there and write a sumarized message what logo you want, tell if they are going to a right direction or tell what idea you like (for example: “I like the idea with arrows combined in the logo but it should be done more creatively” or “I like red and black standing combination”). But do that very generally.  This way you should achieve a better result of submitting new ideas.

Otherwise, if you know what kind of logo you want then you can just tell the designers what you exactly want and do the usual contest holder’s job.

Tip: be active

Mostly contests with an active contest holder are really good. Many designers submit their designs there and if they get a quick response they are about to make the changes and submit again. But it’s actually your choice what kind of contest holder you are and it also depends on your time.

Good luck running contests! I hope this post was helpful for you

As you see they are really detailed, shining, colourful, creative, full of effects. That’s what a  stunning 3D logo should have in it. Hope you enjoyed them!

The reward is $50 but it received 307 entries. How? It’s because of the difference and fun. I have to admit it is a creative idea to launch such a contest.

The story was like that: a designer won $225 prize but as far as I remember he had some problems withdrawing this money. So he decided to have some fun and launched this contest.

Contest holder wanted to get the worst logo designers could come up with. And this is not an easy task for the designers! If you want to design a really ‘good’ logo, then you have to use the colours in a way to hurt the eyeballs. The concept should be stupid, unusual and.. Funny, of course! Some illegible signs or badly spelled words could make it even worse. The logo should also look unprofessional but in order to make this, you have to know how to do it! I mean you have to make it profesionally unprofessional. The creativity for this contest is kinda unlimited – so many various designs that make people laugh.

Okay, let’s look at the winning design!

I think this design is totally worth the winners name. What a clever design, indeed.

Could you beat it?

I’ve been browsing through design contests in the past and never entered any that needs an illustration in the logo. I even rejected private works that require an illustration! And I regret that now. I thought it was not for me and I ccould not do such a thing. The designs submitted for the contests were really awesome and I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything like that. You might think the same about you but don’t hurry to judge! I heard about pople making sketches on a paper some time ago. They make many concepts, then scan them and open with Illustrator. I really thought it was a completely waste of time as it takes so much time of thinking of the concepts and drawing them. But I realized that this doesn’t really take so much time, acually it takes only minutes to draw!

I once went out from the PC for a whole day because I had to work with my father. So I knew that I wouldn’t be able to draw logos on pc that day so I took my notebook and a pencil. I was making drafts, sketches of various ideas that came to my mind during my free time. I found out that making a logo on a paper takes like 2 minutes or even less. When I came back I opened the drafts with Illustrator. I had full shapes so I had to take a pencil tool and do the rest. I now know that I saved really much time because drawing on an Illustrator from scratch with pen tool is a torture! You have you redraw and fix the shapes many times untill you reach the level which looks good enough. When you compare the time spent for drawing with a pencil with the time you  spend on pc and drawing something very similar, the difference could be few hours! So that is really worth drawing if you have required skills to do so.

The other quite a good way to draw a mascot or illustration is just to take a picture and trace it. But it might be too hard to find a right image for your theme. Requires much of searching sometimes so I prefer self-made traced paintings.

Otherwise, I am not telling that you shouldn’t draw directly on a PC, you might be a pro on it!

There are no limits for art. Good designers can make very nice designs, You might want to see some cool mascots so you can visit the following site:
SOSFACTORY – really great designs in their portfolio. The style might be similar in some mascots, but they absolutely look good!

Note: They didn’t ask me to post anything for them, I suggest you to visit them to see the mascots, just what this post is about.

Now you can see 25 illustrations, mascots and logos. Enjoy!

P.S Feel free to leave a comment with your designed mascot! Also, I can place any website when I see their portfolio and decide if  that fits this post’s theme. Leave a comment with a link!

Thank you for reading.

vectortuts+ – a website full of tutorials. There are plenty of them. That’s because they pay $150 for a man who submits a tutorial and they publish it. If you know something cool like creating a nice and detailed icon or something unusual then you have great chances to earn that reward. You can find very many useful tutorials for advanced designers. The lessons are unbelievable and you should read some for sure.

pixel2life – a website filled with over 400 lessons picked from other websites and put together in same place. Quite worth to look at these.. Quite many are from site mentioned above, but you might haven’t seen them yet.

tutorialized.com – again a website full of tutorials (over 370 for Adobe Illustrator). Not the top site but you can find some really useful tutorials showing various techniques that you should know and might be useful in the future. Take a look at these and try to learn something.

Surfnlearn – many tutorials for various Adobe programs.

Tutorials-expert – one more tutorials website. But this time it has many other programs tutorials too.

Good luck with these guys! I will add more if you ask me by leaving a comment.

The big thing is: the logo and other graphic you do has to appeal to yourself!

Some time ago I have been entering these contests. I read the description, see other entries and then open Illustrator. Then I started making a logo and it mostly took me like 2 hours of work. But suddenly I started to criticize it! I was like: “It doesn’t look that good”, “Ouch, my eyeballs!”, “What is this? Does that have any link with the company? NO!!!”. After some monologue I submitted my artwork. And guess what.. I haven’t won any contest with the logos I didn’t like. Well, you might think there is nothing to lose and you should submit the design anyway, but you will mostly win nothing. What to do when your logo doesn’t look attractive? Well, sometimes it needs just a little. I had so many cases when I just changed the sizes, placing, colours or simplified the logo and it became much better! Then you have really better chances to win a nice reward. Sometimes you even have to delete icon and make another but don’t get nervous! It’s a practice and you need it. When you do a second logo for the same contest it mostly seems to be better than the first one. That’s because you have to think harder of what to draw and how to express it. And this is also the reason why you should enter the contest again if your first design was eliminated or rejected. But don’t take it too seriously. If you submit 10 different concepts and the contest holder doesnt like any of them then he doesn’t like your style or so. That wat you should find other competition and try your skills there.

Try to stand out from the crowd.

I’ve seen many contests with really detailed descriptions. And one criterion is colours. The client sometime demands exact colours. And for sure more than 95% of designers submit designs with the colours asked. But of course there are very few people who try to submit a design, which doesn’t really match the requirements. I saw some contests with many participants and in the end the design with slightly different colours won it. It actually shocked me and now I know why he won the money. So you have to remember that the colours customer asks are not Always the colours he needs.

Don’t make anything someone has already made.

You look though submissions and see one really cool looking concept or graphic. You like it and you might think you could increase your winning chance by making something similar or even copying it but that’s not true! Someone has already done that design so why would the contest holder choose your design instead of the original designer? And one quite important thing about this is that copying someone’s design is usually not acceptable by the customers and they mostly reject your submittion immediately without looking at it. So you have always be original.

I Hope you found this post useful for you

ELDC logo – £10.000

Southampton University logo – £360,000

Olympics logo London 2012 – £400,000, that’s like $800,000

Starz – $25 millions including logo and ad campaigns

Pepsi – $1 million for a logo. That’s a part of the whole rebrand cost – 300 millions dollars

Edinburgh logo – £1.020.000

Posten – 55 million dollar for a logo! Also, it was finished in 2 years

I think that spending so much money on a logo is not a really good choice. Logos above cost really huge amounts of money but do you think they are worth it? Look at each of the logo: plain text, very simple designs, I mean, too simple! Not all, but some are lack of creativity or just look bad! I guess it could be possible to get much better logo by spending 1% or even less money of the amounts paid for these.

Is this wasting of money? Or maybe trying to make it guaranteed to have a good brand just by paying much? And how would You rate these logos?