The digg guys are well, digging the Wacom this video just made their homepage. If you haven’t seen what our second prize can do close up, watch this video:

So the great start continues, we’re hovering near the 120 design mark now. Now we have a decision to make should we start to seperate designs or just keep everything together? More info and your chance to vote in the full post.

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and breathe. Wow guys, talk about flying out of the starting blocks. To be honest, we’re struggling to keep up. If theres a slight delay in approving your designs, we apologize. I’m going to get a little more help with the organizing so we can spend some more time on the main blog discussing. We just passed the 85 submissions mark, with plenty waiting in the wings and a very high standard throughout. Great work!

Welcome on board to the good guys of Wilogo. OLP 1 was one of the first of its kind, but since then the design contest concept has been adopted by several companies. Wilogo is one of the more successful. Basically its like OLP but all the time. They’re also now helping us out as a partner, consulting and cross promoting the contest. So welcome guys, and if your having fun here check out wilogo at some point and you can make this sort of contest a regular hobby.

Blooming Print by Elwood & Label01 by bkohl

Its an (S)shirt by Logodesigner & Spreadshirt_005 by Lemerou

A great start yesterday. In total 17 new designs, a few shown above. I can see 9 or 10 that are being prepared as we speak, or type rather. Whats really great is all the discussion thats happening around the designs, its encouraging to see 15 or 16 comments offering suggestions or comments on entries. Keep giving feedback to the other designers, or feel free to rate a design in the comments, let us know which designs you want to see as this weeks weekly picks heading for the grand final.

We also had our first copyright violation. See this entry

(image removed due to request of the copyright owner)

We’ve placed the original tree, found here over the top. It also caused a similar problem when used on this Threadless design. Because of this although its still in the entries area (mainly as an example and because the comments are interesting), it won’t be available for progression to the grand final. We all know that inspiration comes from developing ideas we see around us, but its up to you to turn that inspiration into truly original output. In this case the designer found it listed as a free vector when actually it wasn’t, easy mistake to make but please check your sources.

Whats your favourite entry so far?

elwoods entry of the blooming print lead to a fine discussion about the origin, inspiration and connotation of logos.
What do you think about his draft? Check the discussion at the entry section and tell us.

Here is some links that were posted in the thread, and some more that were on my “logo-bookmark” list:
For example see the 2007 trends at logolounge, which is always a good ressource, have a look at some tutorials at elogo, check the giant list of great designs at logopond.
A great read about the “this reminds me of …” discussion (which is always an issue no matter if you talk about design or music) is the article about quark which had to redesign their logo after having it redesigned. And, last but not least a little funny experiment: see what happens if you ask some people to draw a logo just out of their mind.

I hope it helps. If you have other hints and links, let us know and share - what inspires you when designing?

Very provocative article from Bruce Nussbaum of Business Week:

“In the name of provocation, let me start by saying that DESIGNERS SUCK. I’m sorry. It’s true. DESIGNERS SUCK. There’s a big backlash against design going on today and it’s because designers suck.

So let me tell you why. Designers suck because they are arrogant. The blogs and websites are full of designers shouting how awful it is that now, thanks to Macs, Web 2.0, even YouTube, EVERYONE is a designer. Core 77 recently ran an article on this backlash and so did we on our Innovation & Design site. Designers are saying that Design is everywhere, done by everyone. So Design is debased, eroded, insulted. The subtext, of course, is that Real design can only be done by great star designers.

This is simply not true. ” Read it all here (warning, long alert)

What do you think? Is the quality gap between amateur and real designers shrinking through the advancements of design tools we all have access to today? Has new media just made it easier for us to get an audience, without increasing the quality of the performance?

Just a matter of minutes after we opened the doors, our first entries our in. Lets see if the early bird does catch the worm. At the moment the css is set to resize the images to one consistent size, 220px x120px as specified in the upload area. Please upload your previews in this size. If its really not working we can think about dropping the css rule, but lets see how it goes.

These two from Credonaut. Really nice concepts the first involving a zebra, the second a fig leaf. I hadn’t thought that “your own label” could be interpreted as a barcode, but I suspect we’ll see a few more designs following that theme. What do you think? For me its great to see such high quality entries at the kick-off.

Ready, steady, go. The contest is now open, click the button on the right-hand side or here to get to the upload design area. Have fun!

Hey everyone, greetings from the 9-5 festival in Berlin. Ami, I and some of the rest of the team having been running the Spreadshirt stand here the past few days. Later we’ll run a talk about Spreadshirt, Design Contests, how Spreadshirt fits the future of work and of course the Open Logo Project 1.6. The theme of the event is the future of work, I just arrived and I appear to be the only person so far in this future of work, and indeed the whole building.

Here are some shots of the main hall where we’ve had a Spreadshirt/la Fraise stand for the past few days.

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