Let's flip this around: Jeff paid $512 and got a logo that's definitely done its job. It's recognizable, tasteful and fits with the site design. The company has continued with this design and has been very successful.
So it's clearly worked.
What may not be immediately obvious is why it worked: Jeff had a clear aesthetic in mind and applied it throughout the contest. You can see that from the feedback process on these designs.
Professional designers offer more than mechanical skills with Photoshop and Illustrator, they bring a few other things to the table:
- A sense of taste (which many business owners lack)
- An ability to synthesize multiple inputs and determine what's important
- Strategies for selling a design to a committee of decision makers who can't agree
- etc. etc.
In many cases, these soft skills are a huge value add to a business or project. In some cases, though - a developer who's got a good idea of an overall aesthetic, no need to convince a big group, etc. - all that's really needed is the mechanical work: show me a bunch of designs and I'll pick the best one. In this sort of situation, there's little value to add.
I'd like to echo the best point of your comment, "Strategies for selling a design to a committee of decision makers who can't agree". I think that many of these design by committee or contests
fail greatly in part of the solicitors, not the designers.
In most instances, a bad design is a bad design and won't be chosen. But, it's up to the client to have enough sense to choose the correct design.
I totally agree. It's amazing what a little bit of thought into the problem can do when designing a logo. There's gonna' be a lot of cookie-cutter logos in competitions like this - but one with insight and aesthetic taste is hard to come by. Most good designers move past this type of freelance work pretty quickly by virtue of their trade.
So it's clearly worked.
What may not be immediately obvious is why it worked: Jeff had a clear aesthetic in mind and applied it throughout the contest. You can see that from the feedback process on these designs.
Professional designers offer more than mechanical skills with Photoshop and Illustrator, they bring a few other things to the table:
- A sense of taste (which many business owners lack)
- An ability to synthesize multiple inputs and determine what's important
- Strategies for selling a design to a committee of decision makers who can't agree
- etc. etc.
In many cases, these soft skills are a huge value add to a business or project. In some cases, though - a developer who's got a good idea of an overall aesthetic, no need to convince a big group, etc. - all that's really needed is the mechanical work: show me a bunch of designs and I'll pick the best one. In this sort of situation, there's little value to add.