You’ve drafted your design brief, proofread it twice, crossed your t’s and dotted your i’s. It looks solid to you (naturally – you wrote it!), but will it speak to the dozens of designers who will soon be seeing it?
Here’s an exercise that may prove illuminating: extract only the adjectives from your brief and compile them in a list. On their own, do they paint a coherent picture? Do the sample logos you attached illustrate or undermine them? Designers tend to be visual thinkers, so however elegant your prose might be, you can expect that your audience is more likely to skim than read. Your key adjectives, then, become the lynchpins of your brief.
The above logo design for video production company Zoom Box owes its success in large part to a brief that plays its adjectives right – vivid and specific.
To follow our own technique, here is the constellation of descriptive words from which winning Ukrainian designer DrewNick took his cues:
edgy playful mobile industrial raw rough fast solid deconstructed organized shining
Even among these, there are a few potentially mixed messages – ”rough” and “shining,” for instance. However, the below logo for On Wine, which was included in the brief, helps to make clear that, in this case, the contest holder is not using the word “rough” to literally mean “matte and textured” but something more abstract – a personality trait akin to “edgy.”
As you can see by the slight variations the designer also submitted, below, a bit more feedback was eventually needed to clear up the ambiguity and arrive at the final design.
The end-product, with its crisp, tilted elements and variously sized letters, perfectly conveys the playfulness, dynamism and edge that the brief requested. Verbal-to-visual translation: dead on.
Seen any other edgy-playful-mobile-industrial-raw-rough-fast-solid-deconstructed-organized-shining logos, lately? Or have suggestions for other 99designs contests you’d like to see us explore here? Let us know in the comments!
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So let’s do some rough math on average from what I have seen $300 is the prize for a logo. 400 submissions later one logo gets picked so the actual worth of the logo is about less than a dollar. How is this not hurting the value of true design? No wonder our industry is hurting.
You have a good point. All artistic industries are suffering in this regard. Could designers license their designs to companies? Doubtful. Perhaps a “brand-name” designer could (is there such a thing?). If Andy Warhol had created his own Campbell Soup can design, might Campbell’s have wanted to license it? I don’t know enough about the industry to say.
That’s a great design.