ShopForDesigns – Logo design marketplace, website design, corporate identity design, banner design, crowdsourcing.

Designing a logo for an educational or academic institution can be a subtle task. This is because mostly educational or academic institutes are non profit organizations, yet the objective of the logo that is to be designed for them has the same motto as any other organization whether profit oriented or not. The primary objective of a successful logo is to promote a brand and establish its authority amongst its competitors. Hence the task is subtle. Let us take a look at what we need to keep in mind while developing or designing a logo for an academic institute.

A good logo design or a good corporate brand identity is instrumental in selling a product or to ascertain its legitimacy in the eyes of the prospective customer. In the graphic design world flexibility and scalability are the key factors which determine the success of a particular logo design. A logo should be beyond the barriers of cultural diversity, language, its mode of transmission media and colours. Let me elaborate on this. You might need to transmit a logo via fax or email. It might be printed in a newspaper, published in a website in black and white. So a logo has to be a timeless, durable and universal face of your brand which is scalable.

We find so many companies re-designing their logos and brand identities. It’s not for nothing. They have felt that their logo does not comply to the above guidelines and they took decisions to redesign their logos. A change in brand identity is not an easy thing to carry out. It costs the company a lot. Apart from the direct cost of designing a logo or brand identity, they have to change their letterheads, visiting cards, envelope, and any pre-printed stationery that they might have with the new logo. They also have to spend a lot in advertising by which they can let people know about the change of their brand identity. Still companies change their logos and brand identities when they find that the current logo is not good enough.

We at shopfordesigns.com have been telling our buyers that when they post a logo or graphic design contest they should regularly visit their contest page, post ratings, put comments and give directions to designers regarding what they are looking for. Every designer comes up with a concept based on what he or she thinks is right. But as a buyer, the contest holder is the best judge about the vision and mission statements of his business and the kind of artwork he or she needs.

After a design contest is live at shopfordesigns, designers start posting their concepts. Now it is on the buyer to guide the designers with the colour scheme, catchline, concept and other aspects of design.

To help our contest holders or buyers with these ratings and comment posting, one of our users have come up with an informative and exciting video. He has requested us to post the video at our blog and here it is :

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I am generally on the internet for about 14 to 16 hours a day. Various logos have been my area of interest since the last 10 years or so. I do not know if I can call myself a logo expert but people won’t object if I say that I have fair exposure in logo design.

During my quest for best logo designs, I have come across some great logos and some awefully ill designed logos that break all barriers and norms of logo design dont’s.

So in a nutshell I would like to advice you to steer clear from naive designers who claim to make great logos for peanuts for your brand. Remember my friend there is nothing called a “Free Lunch” in this world. Good things always come for a price.

Say you are competing for a logo design contest at ShopForDesigns. You could use the message board in our site to your advantage and ask questions to the buyer in order to get an edge over others. If you understand pretty well what the client needs then you will not have to look around in the dark. We have seen from our experience that communicating with the buyer well is a contest half won.

By way of conversation try to find out what the buyer has in mind and what is he or she looking for. Remember that every buyer has a picture in mind when he is asking for a logo or some other graphic work. So if you can find out what the buyer has pictured in his or her mind then your work boils down to just putting that imagination into a design.

So now that you have won your logo design contest what comes next is preparing the deliverables for the contest holder which you will need to upload to the website. Here a very helpful tip that we can give you is that if you want the contest holder to give you future work, and most cases we see it happen, then you need to please him with your professionalism. Sending him great deliverables could really be your first step in winning your next graphic design project.

All said and done let us get into the details of planning your deliverables folder. Well now that the battle is won and you emerge victorious still its only a journey half done until you get the client to say the real “wow” in your favour.

Here we outline the tricks and techniques that will help you do it. We would say that as a logo designer or a graphic designer it is your responsibility to get across the proper files to your contest holder even if he has not asked for it.

There are many non-profit organizations which are working for greater causes with an aim to heal the world and make it a better place. The first things that startup non-profits need is a logo and a brand identity. This is because they have to raise funds to further their cause and in order to raise funds they need a very professional logo and a decent brand identity so that people aka donors take them seriously and donate generously.

Well budget in most cases for a logo or a brand identity for a non-profit organization is generally very minimal. They run by donations of their patrons and hence have little resource at their disposal when they are just startups. But they still need a logo and a brand identity to be designed in order to move on.

If you want your business to be noticed, then a professional graphic design is your best bet. But the main problems that a startup has in creating a great web design or logo design by a great professional is financial budget. The solution to this is hiring freelance graphics designers some of whom are really good and are much cheaper. But then again not all the freelance graphic designers are equally good. Some are hugely experienced in designing while some are straight out of design college. Now the problem becomes whom you should hire? How do you know which designer is great and who is not? What if there could be an option like this : Many designers would work for your project and you will choose the work you like. In this case you never need to worry about how good a graphic designer is! You pay for the work you like and not commit to any one designer in particular! Sounds great isn’t it? But where will you find so many designers and such a forum that will help you to do this?

With an aim to make this happen, and to provide a forum where freelance graphic designers and startup owners or someone in need of any graphic design job, can work together, ShopForDesigns, an online crowdsourcing website that creates a forum for designers to showcase their work and win new clients was made. The Omaha, United States based crowdsourcing website was built.

The best part about ShopForDesigns is its abundance of choices or options. The concept is wonderful since it eliminates risk for both the parties. Many argue that the crowdsourcing model is killing the design industry since designers not always get paid for their work. At ShopForDesigns this risk is eliminated. All the contests are prepaid. We hold the money. After the contest is over the winning entry gets paid.

One might argue that there is no surety that my design will win. Well yes there is no guarantee that you design will win. But let us just compare this system to the conventional system of graphic design project. Suppose you want to bid for a graphic design job for some company. You have to supply them with a portfolio of your designs to convince them about your designing capabilities. Graphic designers then have to write a proposal for the job at hand. They have to prepare graphic design concepts also called mock-ups and if the client is a local one then designers might even require to visit their offices for the final negotiation. Sometimes even several times. All these cost you time and money my friend. At shopfordesigns you just make up a concept and submit. If you get a good rating you negotiate with the buyer and proceed accordingly. And if the client really likes your concept you win. It has been seen that many designers use this website as a lead generation website. More than 80% of works done on shopfordesigns lead to consequent work for the graphic designers.

The design process begins when some startup or a business owner / entrepreneur wants a graphic design job to be done and posts it on shopfordesigns forum for submissions. As soon as the listing comes alive, top graphics designers from around the glob read it and start drawing up concepts for submissions. The startup owner can expect to receive concepts in about 6 hours or so. Then designs start flowing in steadily.

It is very important that during the lifetime of the contest the startup owner converses with the designers to tell them what he likes in the submitted design concepts and what he doesn’t. This will help him to get what he is looking for in his designs. There is a message board on site to do just this. Another nice feature is the star rating system. Business owners looking for designs, need to rate the submitted design concepts in a scale of 5 stars. This helps the graphic designers to understand if they are moving in the right direction or not.

In this way we have a winner in about 7days. His design concept gets paid. It has been noticed that once the startup business owner chooses a winner, he generally hires that same designer to do his business card, his website etc. So designers win additional work. So shopfordesigns work also as a graphic design lead generation site.

Works at shopfordesigns generally come from small businesses and startups. They have low budgets and are looking for good designers to do their corporate brand. Until recently this was a catch 22 situation but not anymore. ShopForDesigns helps you launch your contest in a jiffy and you get quality concept designs within hours from ace designers from around the globe.

Hence shopfordesigns is the one stop solution for new entrepreneurs or startups with low budget looking for quality graphic design or web design work in low budget.

www.shopfordesigns.com opened its doors in September 2009 to the public and is slowly gaining popularity amongst the crowdsourcing community. It has all the features that a normal crowdsourcing website has to offer and more.

It has all normal categories like :-

• Logo design
• Website Design,
• Corporate Identity Design
• T-shirt Design
• Twitter background design
• WordPress theme design

It has thousands of talented graphic designers on board who are passionate to their task from the core. These designers use the message board on ShopForDesigns to converse with the buyer and give them exactly what they want. In one word what they produce is marvelous.

ShopForDesigns.com is already getting lots of hits and has created a buzz in the graphic design outsourcing world. Some of its loyal users are really happy with the output and quality of delivery of the top notch designers that are on board…

We are also seeing the number of people registering on this website by the hour. We have also seen a sharp climb in our alexa rank in this month and it is really giving us a kick.

ShopForDesigns.com also boasts of lowest promote value and it really fetches a lot of design submissions. Ask AK KIDS our contest poster and he will vouch for the leverage that we get by submitting a logo design project which is in Blue and Bold. It immediately catches the attention of the best graphic designers and draws amazing submissions. The difference is very noticeable when you see same priced projects getting different submissions. You immediately understand that it is due to the only reason for the project being highlighted.

Upcoming Attractions : Shopfordesigns.com CEO says : “We are coming up with customized christmas card design category very soon. This is a result of a survey we carried out amongst our buyers who are looking for customized Christmas and new years card design. It is a very good novelty product for corporates. It gives businesses a personalized touch and helps develop a warm bondage with its clients.”

To wrap up ShopForDesigns.com is all geared up for a graphical Christmas and New Years bash with all its users!