In 2012, more and more small businesses and big brands turned to crowdsourcing.  Demand for crowdsourcing boomed and we were told that crowdsourcing was “the new black”.

In 2013, it’s no different, small businesses continue to embrace crowdsourcing and I’ve seen our own crowdsourcing platform, DesignCrowd, already double in size since late 2012.

Despite this, some big brands continue to miss golden opportunities to crowdsource. While it’s fair to say more and more big brands (like Doritos, Google and Coca Cola) are crowdsourcing, for every big brand that uses crowdsourcing effectively, another ninety nine have no idea.

While crowdsourcing is not the right path for every business or every project (in some circumstances, traditional agencies may be a better fit) most design projects – particularly logo design projects – lend themselves perfectly to crowdsourcing.

In this article, I’m going to show you 7 logo fails from 2012 where the brand, marketer or head honcho missed the “crowdsourcing is hot right now” memo (and where the logo fail might have been avoided if the project had been crowdsourced).

The London Olympics

The logo for the London Olympics cost £400,000, took one year to make and was absolutely panned by the media, public and design community. Even Iran criticised the logo (and you know when President Amadihnajeed has a crack at your logo that you’ve got a problem).

Olympics logos are the perfect designs to have crowdsourced. The Olympics is a universally loved and respected brand and designers around the would love to work on it. Why not open it up every four years to a global design contest? There are many reasons London should have crowdsourced its logo.

Aside from the tremendous cost and time savings, think about the volume and creativity of entries they would have received, the possible publicity benefits of tapping into the Olympic spirit and having the crowd choose the eventual winner. A global event like the Olympics deserves a global solution.

Ebay

Ebay’s rebranding in 2012 was a great opportunity to upgrade their fun “we love the 90′s” logo. Sadly, they ended up with this logo. Described by some in the design community as “boring” and “risk averse” this logo re-design appears to have been managed by a committee of conservative lawyers (the only innovation is the lower case ‘tm’).

Given Ebay’s open marketplace business model, crowdsourcing (a marketplace business model that relies upon open competition) would have been the perfect choice!

Czech Republic

In an unprecedented move, the Czech Republic decided to introduce a ‘pun’ joke into their national branding and logo. It was an honorable attempt to crack social media, but a definite logo fail.

A country’s brand is one of the perfect things to crowdsource. Let your country or the world design the logo. Here’s an example mock crowdsourcing project for ‘Brand Australia’ that highlights the diversity of ideas crowdsourcing can provide a country brand.

Microsoft

Microsoft’s new logo is a ‘me too’ logo with the typeface a hop, skip, and straightened character away from Apple’s. It’s remarkable how similar Microsoft’s logo typeface “Seboe”, is to Apple’s typeface “Myriad Pro”.

Microsoft definitely should have considered crowdsourcing its logo. In addition to getting a more creative logo, crowdsourcing would’ve been a powerful way to engage the influential design community (a stronghold for Apple). Getting designers and/or hipsters to use and love your phones, tablets, laptops and brand is one way to make your brand cool and crowdsourcing would be a way for Microsoft to do this via co-creation.

The Brooklyn Nets

Created by Jay Z (part owner of the Brooklyn Nets NBA basketball team) the Nets’ new logo made the design community physically sick with 56% of designers rating the logo “bad”.

Rebranding a major sporting brand is an expensive decision (apparel, stadium, sponsorship and merchandise changes) so you can’t do it every 2 years and you’ve got to get it right. It’s probably something you don’t want a rapper – even if he is Beyonce’s husband – designing in the back of his hummer.

Stedelijk Museum

The Stedelijk Museum relaunched and rebranded itself in 2012. While a lot of thought went into the logo (amazingly), the font makes it look like it was produced on typewriter and its execution was panned by designers (with 69% saying the execution was “bad”) making it a mega logo fail.

The Stedelijk Museum’s new logo suggests they were struggling for ideas. In the situation, crowdsourcing (or maybe even Jay Z) is worth a shot.

NRL (Australia)

The NRL’s new logo received mixed reviews from the design community and the public (with one poll saying 17% thought the logo was “ugly”).

The NRL competition is one of the largest sporting competitions in Australia (like the NFL in the US) and the public and design community would’ve jumped at the chance to participate in an open design contest. It could have also given the NRL some much desired global attention.

Conclusion

While “ugly” might be too harsh a word to describe these 7 logos (although it clearly didn’t stop some), there is certainly a sense of failure and missed opportunity in all of these designs.

It’s clear big brands have a lot to learn from small businesses when it comes to crowdsourcing. Those brands that do take the step towards crowdsourcing, will soon find themselves rolling in ideas and designs, great publicity opportunities, and a whole raft of cost savings to enjoy. The public and the design community will clamour to work on your project and share their ideas with you and the world.

Whether the NRL or the Stedelijk Museum, ebay or Microsoft, Jay Z or Lord Coe, there’s definitely a solid case for crowdsourcing your next logo.

Alec Lynch is a programmer and the founder and CEO of design crowdsourcing marketplaces DesignCrowd and BrandCrowd. DesignCrowd was founded in 2007 and is based in Sydney, Australia.

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Pro Tools, as many of you may know, is the industry-standard creative software suite for musicians.

It’s also the name of the latest product from 99designs, the crowdsourced spec work site for getting creative work done on the cheap.

Pro Tools is a digital audio platform for Mac and Windows made by Avid and first released in 1991, according to Wikipedia. It’s in just about every professional audio/video setup. Ad agencies often have in-house A/V specialists and Pro Tools experts whose only job is to edit audio using Pro Tools.

According to 99designs, Pro Tools is a digital software suite for ad agencies to find freelancers and work with clients. While it’s unlikely that there’s any overlap between the functions of the two products, we’re confused as to why 99designs would choose a name — and not a great name, at that — that was already so closely aligned with another company’s software.

And that’s the kind of confusion that leads to trademark lawsuits.

“We’re aware of that product and aren’t concerned as we don’t see any legal or other problematic issues arising there,” a 99designs rep wrote to VentureBeat this morning in an email.

However, the Avid reps we contacted might see some legal or other problematic issues arising there. They’re looking into the situation now and promised to get back to us shortly.

The 99design folks did not contact Avid prior to the launch; our contact said that after discussing the matter internally, the team decided to proceed with the launch and not pursue a trademark for the name.

99designs also would make the point that its software is for a different industry — ads, not music. However, given the number of Pro Tools editor positions at ad agencies, a fair argument could be made to the contrary.

A bit more about the 99designs version of Pro Tools: The company’s target audience of mid-sized to small web and marketing agencies are usually coming to 99designs to find freelance graphic design work. They are looking for fresh talent, but the site’s crowdsourced contest model means they get to see a lot of work from a lot of creatives for very little money before making their decision.

The new 99designs software suite includes invite-only contests to help agencies set a higher bar for crowdsourced submissions, presentation tools for working with clients, private and “blind” contests to keep IP on lock, and custom non-disclosure agreements to work better with careful clients and freelance designers.

All in all, it’s right in line with what 99designs already does. We just gotta ask: Couldn’t they have come up with a better name?

Totally objectively, “Pro Tools” is just a crap name for a product. It’s generic and vague. Heck, my face is a pro tool. The Internet is a pro tool. A jackhammer is a pro tool. The phrase “pro tool” in and of itself has absolutely no meaning — outside its now universally acknowledged meaning related to audio software.

And what about SEO? No search engine in the world is going to take a “Pro Tools” query and serve up a 99designs page.

Huh. Maybe they shoulda crowdsourced that.

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That’s almost what happened to TimesSquare.com, a New York publication that opened a logo contest on DesignCrowd, an online marketplace for design jobs. The company offered a $10,000 prize for the winner, and as of this morning, DesignCrowd’s 83,000 designers have submitted 5717 entries.

“If crowdsourcing was an Olympic sport, we’d win a gold medal,” DesignCrowd chief executive Alec Lynch said.

Lynch believes that both the prize and the number of submissions are the largest ever for an online logo contest.

[Update] I just received an email from a PR rep for 99designs, which received 7,972 entries for an Occupy.com logo contest earlier this year. So: no world record … and the gold goes to 99designs.

DesignCrowd is a online marketplace for freelancers, similar to an eLance, oDesk, or Guru.com, but it only focuses on design. The site also offers community contests, crowdsourcing challenges that open up gigs to all designers on the site. For $30, you can post a design challenge to which anyone on the site can respond. Of course, the bigger a reward you promise for the winner, the more interest you’ll likely receive.

The entries are not all from individual designers — in fact, the 5,717 entries were created by just 1,300 designers. Art Tank – the #11-ranked designer or design team, with over $25,000 in billings so far – has submitted at least five designs.

Source: DesignCrowd

Submissions for the TimesSquare.com logo

In what seems to be an oversight, no online voting exists to determine the winner or at least highlight top options — clients decide which logos they like. With so many submissions, that will be a formidable task for TimesSquare.com.

In any case the founder of TimesSquare.com, Lorenzo Tartamella, seems happy enough, saying that ”the process has exceeded our expectations and the world record is icing on the cake.”

But designers will have to exercise considerable patience.

The winning logo will not be unveiled until December 12 ( yes, that’s 12-12-12) … in, of course, Times Square.

Image credit: Stuart Monk / Shutterstock.com

The San Francisco startup’s plans sound pretty similar to Threadless, a site where artists submit T-shirt designs, then users rate the designs, and the most popular ones are turned into shirts. On Chirply, artists submit designs for cards, then users vote of their favorites, and Chirply prints and sells the top-ranked cards.

The site already held its “soft launch” a few weeks ago, where it went live with little fanfare or publicity. Since then, it has received 200,000 pageviews and an average of 30 votes per user. And artists submitted more than 100 designs, leading to the 12 cards that Chirply is selling starting today. (Co-founder and chief executive Gagan Palrecha said he hopes to print 10 to 20 new designs each month.) Chirply’s artist- and Web-centric model seems to favor designs that are good-looking and often quirky and funny — at least, judging from the cards that Palrecha showed me earlier this week.

And it sounds like the team has spent a lot of time thinking and talking to artists about how to make the site work for them. For one thing, artists aren’t handing over their copyrights. If their work is selected for a card, then Chirply will ask for exclusive rights to create printed objects based on the design, but artists still own the copyright, and they can do other things with it, like selling T-shirts. Artists receive a $300 upfront fee and also a royalty on sales.

Palrecha said he wants to keep artists engaged with the community even if their work doesn’t win, for example by offering them discounts for submitting or featuring their work on the Chirply blog.

The company is starting out with cards but plans to expand into notebooks and gift-wrapping. It’s also exploring other sales options, like physical stores.

Chirply was incubated by Y Combinator and has raised $1.1 million from a long list of notable investors, including Keith Rabois, Warren Hellman, Dave McClure, Mitch Kapor, Charles River Ventures, and Ignition Partners.