Pixable

At Pixable, our start up that enables people to print their Facebook photos and content, we have finally chosen a logo.  Believe it or not, I have counted over 300 logo proposals until we have made the final decision.

Everyone told us that what matters is the company name, not the logo. For that reason, in January, we used “the wisdom of crowds” to select the company name and we sent a survey to +100 friends to vote for the names we proposed in a survey. But as this is a consumer facing product, we felt that the logo design is a very important part of our identity.

Since January we have been exploring various options and about a month ago we decided to use Crowdspring, a crowd sourcing website dedicated to graphic design. Crowdspring is a pretty recent service although there are similar competitors. The interesting thing about Crowdspring is that you decide how much money you want to award to the winning designer and you can also iterate with the graphic designers, asking for modifications.

Given that we are in the personalized and on-demand printing industry, we wanted a logo that could print in high quality independently on the printer’s quality, could print in different backgrounds, could print in black and white and we could also easily modify the colors. We also provided some guidelines in Crowdspring about the message the logo should convey in relation to our value propostion: “Pixable turns your Facebook photos into printed memorabilia in under 5 minutes”.This is: Speed to create the albums in less than 5 minutes, simplicity, user friendly online service with no download required, creative design and low price. We also mentioned our target demographics (age, gender, social and online behavior, or native language), types of fonts/logos we like, and the things we did not want to see in our design. We also needed to have something characteristic in the logo that could be used as our icon (the “p” ) and we also wanted to maximize the “real estate” of the logo, i.e., a compact design without much vertical or horizontal space.

We received over 140 logo proposals and we could iterate with the designers in a daily basis (all of them very responsive). Our whole team was aligned with ~5 logos and we finally chose the one below, which we love. We use the “p” , which looks like an elegant, stylish, chic and simple camera, as our icon.

I highly recommend Crowdspring for everyone starting a company and willing to have more options to choose their logo from. In Crowdspring you can start from nothing; or you can even start with mocks or very specific guidelines and let the designers on Crowdspring iterate over them.

Disclaimer: I do not know anyone at Crowdspring.