A brand can forward their message in many ways. That’s what every Graphic Designer have to know in order to reach a creative solution. I can feel that the philosophy surrounding logotypes is sacred. It gives no room for creative exploration, and it can harm the creative process. Personally I like to be sewed in by boundaries - simply because it gives me a challenge.

But in a creative process there’s very easy to overlook the User Centered Perspective(!). To be too creative. This is a problem (shit, I really sound conservative). It’s important to understand how the specified audience will respond. And how they ACTUALLY will interact iwth it.

And ofcourse: E_v_e_r_y___c_a_s_e___i_s___u_n_i_q_u_e. And that’s why we can’t compare this logotype with Nike’s swoosh and Apple’s Apple. At all.

For the collaboration-idea I say: cool, but hey, without the prize - this competition would be thankful if they got a total of 20 submitions.

Really gotta get some sleep…. (I preserve the right to deny that I have ever written this)

I thought the idea of having a range of different prizes, was to reward different aspects of user collaboration.
If you serve as a filter for Mr. Piller, his expertise doesn’t help him in discovering all those approaches, that were so innovative that even the spreadshirt team may have overlooked them.

Actually I think those approaches that receive the most attention are extremly subtle, clever and well executed, but few of them are daring, or exploring the concept of “your own label” to the max. This exploration may yield results that no body would like as a brand (yet), but which are an import part of the user innovation process. (like the playfully-different logo of Elanz, or some of my own contributions)

I have observed a self-reinforcing loop of logos sticking to visual memes and repeating them in excess, just because the spreadshirt-team happened to praise an early version. It is a good thing to have attractors guiding user innovation, but it’s a bad thing having too few of them, since this might lead to premature convergence to a possibly suboptimal solution.

The lack of calloboration is another problem, but I think this is mainly because it is neither clearly specified whether and how we are supposed to improve upon existing solutions, nor are there any tools available.
And there is a huge uncertainity about design morals here - people seem afraid to further elaborate on a logo or concept that was contributed by someone, because it is perceived as her or his “intellectual property”.

Why don’t you just require contributors to provide the source for their logos in vector format, so others could quickly reuse, refine and redefine those logos? of course it will be harder to assign prizes, and identify winners, once people actually start to work together, rather than relying on competition as the sole driving force - but I think you are giving away half the potential of user innovation…

Okay, I hope my criticism was not too harsh. This logo competition is great, and I love being part of it, but there seems some room for improvement in the general framework and procedures. Maybe you can fix this as we go, or in the Open Logo Project next year ;)

-> okay, just to give you (or since you said you are not a teamworker *all the others who are*) an idea: you could use the comment form or even announce when doing an entry that you would like to team up. at lafraise some of the members already teamed up, organized totally by themselves.
but we talked about it a minute ago and maybe we can just set up a little page where team-requests and exchange can be handled.