IamaSource.com - Design contests and online creative services

IamaSource Log Book #1

IamaSource Log Book is a space we want to share occasionally in order to discuss about us, about our community and about IamaSource a bit closer.
It is a space to analyze some issues in more depth, and also it could be an opportunity to answer to your daily e-mails we use to receive, including congratulations for our project, questions, doubts, requests, suggestion and also criticism (constructive, of course).

The last hours main issue is absolutely the choice to ask for help to our designers community to select the IamaSource logo contest winner with voting that will soon begin.
This choice was thought hard and we have found many reasons.

Thanks to this we would like to give the opportunity, to those who want to, to be active part of this contest once more, avoiding to end with an independent and unique choice by IamaSource. At the same time we want to choose the best creative proposals based on simple criteria.

Selection of finalists

Here are the criteria on which we choose the best creative proposals:

- our preferences related to our website layout (avoiding the infamous “I like it because I like it” heard it from too many clients, a sentence acceptable in some situations, not when you have 719 designers);

- a good development of the layout, thanks to the designers who send the proposals and get our suggestion in the properly way, having time to correct and make some variations;

- a strong connection to the brief. The designers saw in our comments the requests to focus on the brief requirements, trying to give suggestion always referring to what we wrote in the brief.

Some criteria for proposals which are not in the final selection:

- personal style but far from what we’ve requested (in this contest). After 60 days full immersion we can recognize the style of our designers at first sight, just looking at his proposal (maybe we need a long holiday). What’s not ok for this contest, could be the style other people are looking for, and many contests are starting on IamaSource;

- development and variations are missing. Unfortunately there are many creative proposals which should deserve to be in the final selection but they have not been developed as requested, or they are not set on a black background as requested in the brief. And we could not turn a blind eye just for one designer: this is not what we want to do;

- far from brief requirements. The creative thoughts run wild and our purpose was to focus on our suggestion (useful hopefully). Sometimes the suggestion helped the designers to improve their proposals, sometimes not.

- confused styles. Some creative proposals look nice, but these are followed by other proposals with a confusing style, created by the same designer: this made us doubt about the final choosing. This is also an example of how is important to “sell yourself the best you can”, so it’s better to concentrate on the details of few layouts then send hundreds of different variations.

Why vote?

We want that the voting method, besides help us choosing the winner, should bring more important messages:

IamaSource is a designers community and who more than the designers has the right to choose which will be the logo, such an important element?

We would like that the 2.500 € prize was awarded to a designer chosen by his “colleagues”. We believe there is no greater satisfaction than receive recognition from a jury of “experts like you” rather than a single voice.

We can not feel exactly as a client, (because we used to work for the client) we’d like to think that we help someone of you with our suggestion about how to change your proposal, trying to give suggestion to everyone request for it. That’s why we used a different way to reach the same goal. There’ll be one winner (unfortunately we still don’t know how to make everybody win) and we prefer to make the choice of the finalists and let the community chose our/their new logo (half and half).

What we want to avoid

Our purpose was to avoid:

- a “popularity contest” where everyone can vote, even if he/she did not join the contest. Think about it: “"Whoever has the most friends/parents wins”. Is that correct?

- the possibility to vote every proposal. For instance: you’ve to select the best 2010 song, choosing among 4300 song and 719 artists. You need to listen to every song at least, or choose without listening most of them. IamaSource have listened all those songs in the past two months, knowing the artists and that’s why we’d like (as a 50% client) to select the finalists following the criteria described.
We’re available for further clarifications and we'd like to have your feedbacks about this..