A logo design contest gets you more logos than you can use and no answer to the question a logo is meant to carry. You get options. You don't get a decision.
On 9 September, Syriatel Cash, the mobile wallet run by the Syrian telecom company Syriatel, announced an open contest for its new visual identity, with a $1,000 prize for the winning design. A year earlier the Syrian Basketball Federation did the same. It asked "all creatives" for a new identity, set a deadline of 20 October and promised a panel of Syrian and international design experts to judge. In Syria, the contest has quietly become the default way to get an identity.
I'm not against contests. They're fine for a poster, a student award or a mascot vote. I'm against using one to decide who a company is.
Why do companies run logo design contests?
The easy answer is money. It doesn't hold for a company the size of a national telecom operator. It has budgets, a marketing department and agencies on call. So the contest isn't saving money. It's saving a decision.
Deciding what a wallet stands for is hard work inside a company. Who is it for? What should people feel when they hand their money to a phone? What does it promise that the bank down the road doesn't? Those questions are uncomfortable and political, and a contest lets everyone skip them.
The thinking behind it is that more options will lead to the decision. It works the other way round. You need the decision before you can judge the options.
What does a contest leave out?
A designer entering a contest gets a brief of a paragraph or two. No customer interviews, no look at the competitors, no time with the people who will use the identity every day. So entrants do what anyone does without information: they draw the category. For a wallet that means coins, shields, arrows and phones. For a sports federation, a ball and a flame.
The judges then pick the entry they like most. The identity gets chosen on taste, by people who never decided what it should say.
There's a second gap. A logo is the part you can see. The identity is the system behind it: how the mark works as an app icon at 40 pixels, on a printed receipt, on a shop sign in bad light. A contest prize rarely pays for that work, so it either doesn't get done or gets done later, by someone else, without the thinking.
The result is decided when the announcement is written
The terms of a contest decide who enters. When the ask is unpaid work for a fixed prize, most experienced designers and studios sit it out. That's not pride. It's arithmetic: a studio can't put weeks of research into a job it will most likely lose.
So the shortlist is shaped by the announcement, not by the judging. By the time the panel meets, the most important choice has already been made.
Are logo design contests worth it?
A logo design contest is worth it when you already know exactly what the logo must say and only need someone to draw it. Most companies run one because they don't know yet. The contest then hands the hardest decision, what the brand stands for, to strangers working without a brief, and the judges choose on taste.
What about a 99designs contest for a small business?
The same logic scales down. On 99designs, a logo contest costs from $249 for around 30 concepts to $1,050 for the top package. For a small business that's less than most designers charge, and you can get a clean, usable mark.
But 30 concepts aren't 30 strategies. They're 30 guesses at a question nobody answered. It's the same trade as a cheap gig, which I wrote about in Is a Fiverr logo good enough for your business?: you're buying a mark, not the thinking behind it.
What to do instead
- Decide the position first. One sentence a buyer would repeat about you. If you can't write it, that's the job, and it's what a brand strategist does.
- Write a real brief: who it's for, what it must make them believe, and every place it has to work.
- Hire one designer, or pay a short list of two or three for their first concepts. Paid work gets serious thinking.
- Judge every option against the brief, not against your taste. Ask "does this say what we decided?" before "do we like it?"
If you still want a contest after all that, run it. With a decision and a brief in hand, it can work. Without them, you're not choosing an identity. You're choosing a drawing.
