Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tarsnap logo contest

mail.tarsnap.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 129 posts

Re: Tarsnap logo contest

#11

Post by ericdykstra »

I think you would end up with a better logo if you just did a call to your mailing list for designer recommendations, and paid a real designer $500 for a few hours of their work to come up with their best effort.

By opening a contest, you're not only going to get a much lower quality of submissions, but in the end, the final decision is going to be made by you, someone "useless at anything artistic".

Paying a designer $500 won't get you a full brand identity makeover, but that's not what you're going for. You should be able to find a talented designer who will spend an hour discussing what you want to get our of your logo, some time going over a number of their own ideas, and then wrap up the project and give you the sizes you need and a vector file if you ever need to scale your logo up or down.

Re: Tarsnap logo contest

#12

Post by vicbrooker »

Considering Tarsnap doesn't have a GUI I'd suggest a text-only logo - something like Tarsnap_ for a full logo and then just T_ for social media icons/favicon/128x128.

I can put something together but at the end of the day it's just changing fonts until there's a winner.

Colin, if you're interested in the idea and there's a particular font/color you would like used let me know and I'll make the pngs for you. Don't stress about payment, it's quick and easy for me to do.

Re: Tarsnap logo contest

#13

Post by lancer383 »

cperciva wrote: post #3
prawn wrote: post #2

A good way to make sure that the designer gets the full fee (without losing a commission to 99designs or by them participating in a design contest with no guarantee of getting paid) is to choose one designer and offer them the $500. Does the interest in design contests stem from a fear of paying and getting something you might not like? Or not knowing what you might like until you see it?

I have no idea what I might like. I'm hoping to get some discussion and sharing of ideas -- including from people who don't have any interest in or ability to actually produce a logo themselves. If I knew that, say, I wanted a graphic of a piece of tar being snapped in half, I'd look for an artist and say "here's $500, please draw this for me". But given that I have no idea what I want, I figure the more people I inv…

Right, but the issue is that 99 out of 100 designers will do work for you and not get paid for it, while one will. There are some good links to thoughts about speculative work here: http://www.nospec.com/articles

Re: Tarsnap logo contest

#14

Post by joelhooks »

ericdykstra wrote: post #11

I think you would end up with a better logo if you just did a call to your mailing list for designer recommendations, and paid a real designer $500 for a few hours of their work to come up with their best effort. By opening a contest, you're not only going to get a much lower quality of submissions, but in the end, the final decision is going to be made by you, someone "useless at anything artistic". Paying a designe…

Paying a single designer directly can be really frustrating. $500 only buys you so many variations, and if none of them hit the mark, you are SOL, either settling for something "meh" or forking out more $$ for another round. At the low end, crowd sourcing logo design makes a lot of sense.

Re: Tarsnap logo contest

#15

Post by joelhooks »

cperciva wrote: post #3
prawn wrote: post #2

A good way to make sure that the designer gets the full fee (without losing a commission to 99designs or by them participating in a design contest with no guarantee of getting paid) is to choose one designer and offer them the $500. Does the interest in design contests stem from a fear of paying and getting something you might not like? Or not knowing what you might like until you see it?

I have no idea what I might like. I'm hoping to get some discussion and sharing of ideas -- including from people who don't have any interest in or ability to actually produce a logo themselves. If I knew that, say, I wanted a graphic of a piece of tar being snapped in half, I'd look for an artist and say "here's $500, please draw this for me". But given that I have no idea what I want, I figure the more people I inv…

I wasted money this year on a designer, who had work we liked, but couldn't come up with anything we liked for our brand. Wish I had crowd sourced it.

Re: Tarsnap logo contest

#17

Post by tptacek »

dpapathanasiou wrote: post #10
cperciva wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea what I might like. I'm hoping to get some discussion and sharing of ideas -- including from people who don't have any interest in or ability to actually produce a logo themselves. If I knew that, say, I wanted a graphic of a piece of tar being snapped in half, I'd look for an artist and say "here's $500, please draw this for me". But given that I have no idea what I want, I figure the more people I inv…

But given that I have no idea what I want, I figure the more people I invite to provide ideas the better. You can just do what Steve Jobs did with Next: pick a designer you like, and leave it entirely up to him. Ironically not because Jobs didn't have ideas on what he wanted but because the designer insisted: "I asked him if he would come up with a few options, and he said, 'No, I will solve your problem for you and…

That worked because Jobs could contract Paul Rand. Colin has $500 to spend.

Re: Tarsnap logo contest

#18

Post by cperciva »

parennoob wrote: post #6

I suppose tarsnap is named like 'portsnap', which you also wrote, but what is the thought process behind calling that 'portsnap'? That might help stimulate some ideas and suggestions. I am assuming it's not a piece of tar snapped in half. Although sometimes, having the FreeBSD ports system compile perl and python from scratch when I am trying to install emacs does make me want to snap it in half (yes, yes, I know I a…

portsnap = SNAPshots of the FreeBSD PORTs tree

tarsnap = TAR backups, in a SNAPshotted model (vs. incremental backups). I also liked the fact that it reminded FreeBSD users of portsnap, which is a very popular tool.

Re: Tarsnap logo contest

#19

Post by s0rce »

dpapathanasiou wrote: post #10
cperciva wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea what I might like. I'm hoping to get some discussion and sharing of ideas -- including from people who don't have any interest in or ability to actually produce a logo themselves. If I knew that, say, I wanted a graphic of a piece of tar being snapped in half, I'd look for an artist and say "here's $500, please draw this for me". But given that I have no idea what I want, I figure the more people I inv…

But given that I have no idea what I want, I figure the more people I invite to provide ideas the better. You can just do what Steve Jobs did with Next: pick a designer you like, and leave it entirely up to him. Ironically not because Jobs didn't have ideas on what he wanted but because the designer insisted: "I asked him if he would come up with a few options, and he said, 'No, I will solve your problem for you and…

I'd trust Paul Rand too.

Re: Tarsnap logo contest

#20

Post by klawed »

cfqycwz wrote: post #8
cperciva wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea what I might like. I'm hoping to get some discussion and sharing of ideas -- including from people who don't have any interest in or ability to actually produce a logo themselves. If I knew that, say, I wanted a graphic of a piece of tar being snapped in half, I'd look for an artist and say "here's $500, please draw this for me". But given that I have no idea what I want, I figure the more people I inv…

Lots of people hire a graphic designer with no real idea of what they want--the point of a graphic designer is to talk to a client about the ideas and values of their business, think a lot about those things, go through a bunch of iterations, and then eventually end up with a finished product. That takes a lot of work--usually at least 30 to 40 hours for a good logo. Would you put in 40 hours of work for somebody on…

>You can rest assured of this as well: people will definitely submit to your contest--but none of them will be great designers, because all of them will be people who place the value of their work at somewhere around "maybe 500 dollars."

This would almost certainly be true if content participants had no connection to the business. In this case, participants my be considering their work to be pro-bono work with a value much greater $500.

Post reply on HN