Harvard Business School forum crowdsources logo

Announcement posted by DesignCrowd.com 09 Nov 2010

Harvard Business School's Forum for Innovation and Growth has used crowdsourcing site DesignCrowd.com to crowdsource its new logo design.

Design crowdsourcing site DesignCrowd.com has helped the Forum for Innovation and Growth at Harvard Business School (HBS) crowdsource its new logo. The logo contest (one of hundreds of logo contests hosted by DesignCrowd) ran for 10 days and offered designers $400 as well as the opportunity to add HBS's Forum for Innovation and Growth to their portfolio. The contest received 267 innovative logo designs from logo designers around the world giving Harvard's US-based Forum for Innovation and Growth access to creative logo concepts from designers as far away as the Ukraine and Australia. The winning logo design came from UK logo designer Brent Atkinson (BrentCMI) while designers from Canada, Argentina and the USA received runner up payments.

The benefits of logo crowdsourcing became obvious to Harvard Business School’s James Allworth, who had the responsibility of managing the project on DesignCrowd and described DesignCrowd as a 'game changer'. Here is Mr Allworth's personal opinion of DesignCrowd's crowdsourcing process:

“DesignCrowd changes the game for getting creative work done. In the old world, you try to find a single designer that understands you and what you're hoping to achieve. You gauge them on their past work, and you just have to hope they'll get your work right as well.

In the new world, you jump on DesignCrowd, and you can instantly tell the designers who get what it is you're after. The reason? They've uploaded it there for you to see! You gain access to a veritable army of people who are great at what they do, and who come up with ideas that you hadn't even imagined you wanted. They're all competing to get your business.

My personal opinion? It's a great service, and I highly recommend it.”

Harvard Business School joins the list of other prominent brands to have crowdsourced graphic design through DesignCrowd. Last yearglobal shoe company HI-TEC crowdsourced 30 icon designs through DesignCrowd; Fair Trade Australia crowdsourced their logo; B&T magazine ran a Brand Australia Logo Contest; and Dirt.com crowdsourced their new logo (and received 630 different logo designs).

DesignCrowd hopes other big brands and prominent institutions will look to DesignCrowd for help with their design projects and avoid attempting crowdsourcing initiatives themselves which can lead to problems (as US clothing company Gap recently discovered).

About DesignCrowd

DesignCrowd.com is a worldwide crowdsourcing service for logo, web and graphic design. DesignCrowd is a venture backed Australian company.