When you launch a website or business, having a bold and representative logo can be a huge advantage. For example, can you imaging the logo for Pepsi, Virgin, MacDonalds, Apple, etc? Having such a strong logo helps people to remember your brand. If you have a logo that’s quirky, funny, or clever, then you’ve made it even easier to remember your logo.

Getting a professional logo designed can be expensive. Design agencies could charge you hundreds, if not thousands for a your logo. For medium or large companies, that’s great! However, for the rest of us with a small business, or even smaller website, premium prices for a logo are just not practical.

However, there’s a great way to get fresh and unique logos from just £30 to 50. I’ve used this technique to have logos such as the Big Eco Directory logo (above), and my consulting business logo Streamlined Thinking (below).

The technique is based on something called a logo contest. What you do is specify your requirements on a design contest forum, specify a prize amount (usually in US Dollars and paid via Paypal) and wait for the designs. To get the best results, you provide constructive feedback on each design that’s made. After a fixed time (around 3 to 5 days) you close the content, choose the winner, and then pay the artist for the best design.

The forum I currently use for logo contests is Digital Point, where I ran a $30 contest for The Big Eco Directory and a $50 contest for Streamlined Thinking. However, in order to run a contest, you do need to be an active contributor to the Digital Point forums, of which I am.

If you have a bit more money ($200 to $500), you can run a contest on 99 Designs which is a spinoff from another forum. However, you don’t need to be a regular contributor to start a contest at 99 Designs. The designs on 99 Designs are of a higher calibre (and more expensive), but the quality of logos from the Digital Point Contents Forum are perfectly good enough if your budget starts at $50.

If you do run your own logo contest at Digital Point, here are some tips:

• Limit the contest to just 4 days
• Offer feedback on every single design. Try to say what you do and don’t like on each design.
• Offer around $50 to $100, as this attracts the better designers. Offer less than $50, and the better designers just don’t enter the contest.

If you want a professional logo designed, but you don’t want to become a member of Digital Point, then please contact me. For a fee of £40 GBP (plus the fee for the design), I’ll handle the running of the contest for you, including getting lots of feedback from you about the designs.