Artistic design competitions

Al Hart

We recently completed a web site design project with crowdSPRING.

crowdSPRING pits a number of energetic creatives against each other to design items like logos or web sites. I felt that this was somewhat unfair to the creatives, and I felt there were a number of minor problems with the overall process.

However, I am glad to have a new web site look. You can see the prototype here: Website.

People had complained that our old web site was not professional enough, and that many parts of it looked like a wiki.

If you have any comments on the new site, let me know.

What are your thoughts about sites like crowdSPRING?

If you want to know more about the process or experience, just ask.

richcat

thats looking

hebrides

Yes it is much better than the last. The front page (index) is great but everytime you try a new page it seems you get a different layout. This bounces the logo and the navigation elements and style elements all over the place each time you click. Also the entire page refreshes each time you try a new page so again you are jolted with the need to refocus and re-orient your eyes. If it was possible to take a person to new content without rearranging and refreshing everything it would be a more pleasing experience. IMHO the only changes to the page that need to happen are the changes needed to accomodate the new content. I find the best pages do just that. They make it obvious that your new content has arrived without changing the entire viewing area.

pbacot

Similar comments as Hebrides. Even on large screen, one must scroll to the thumbnails. Then when one is chosen the page reorients to the top (a lot of empty blue space) and the image. so everything jumps each time and then you scroll down to pick another thumbnail, the window jumps etc. I'd use smaller thumbnails across the top and try to get it so an average (15"-17") screen user could pick thumbnails with the viewing area always constant in position.

The blue is very blue and distracting. I'd tone that down.

You did good otherwise as far as I looked.

Al Hart

Thanks for the comment. I just received an alternate layout without the blue, to I will probably use the blue on the first page, but leave if off the other pages. (I have the other pages skipping over the blue until I get the alternate layout installed).

Also, the headings (with two words run together in a font that changes colors are too large. I am purchasing a PHP server solution which will serve up smaller images for the heading is a smaller font. (The font, Blue Mountain, is not installed on most machines - so I will use images instead.)

Here is what it is supposed to look like:

I can pick the gallery image page to load the images without reloading the page (Thanks for reminding me. I forgot that I could do that.)

There are really just two page formats - with and without the blue bar. What may be confusing is that two of three of the top button links - products, gallery, and education - jump to old pages which haven't been converted yet - stick to Contact, dealers and support to see the proper page transition look.

I should have several of these things fixed by tomorrow night, and I will post a note when it is closer to ready. But I appreciate your taking a look before I go public with the site.

hebrides

I checked again and yes I understand the old pages are still there.
I checked the links that have the new template. The problem is your index page is centered in the browser and your subpages justify to the left. They should either all be centered or all left.

By the way I like the style and the blue color is no problem for me...I just happen to like a bright royal blue.

Al Hart

Here are some comments about the crowdSPRING process:

We ran a contest on crowdSPRING to develop a new look for the web site, see New Web Site, for the winning design.

You can compare this to our home page

We are now running another contest to design a logo for the web site. See Logo Contest

(You may want to comment on the logos proposed, or you may even want to submit your own ideas)

Good Things

The pleasant surprise was that from the very first proposal, we got good ideas - mostly about what to include on the site. If we had redesigned the site ourselves, we might have improved the look of the title area - probably by "borrowing" a look form some other web site - but we would not have realized the importance of changing the contents as well.

The first proposal suggested the following contents:

* Flash movie of image gallery (we had already added this to our site)
* Testimonials from users
* Hot News
* Support Links
* Featured products
* Second set of Gallery images

These all seem obvious now, but the layout and specific sections were a new idea to us.

For the final site we chose to use:

* Sliding list of video tutorials (we didn't have tutorials whenwe started the competition)
* Featured products
* Flash movie of image gallery
* Latest news
* Support Links

The important thing here is that we decided to keep the first page simple, someone suggested that we keep the first page simple, and encourage users to go to other pages.

Difficulties

crowdSPRING is still learning as the go. It was not at all clear what the cost for a project would be. They advertise that there is a minimum of $200.00, but there are actually different minimums which aren't obvious until you select the project.

In our case we wanted a web site design - including a new logo. After we started the contest, they suspended it because the minimum for our project needed to be to minimum for web site design plus the minimum for a new logo. We agreed to increase the project cost to cover both - but then wound up having to run another contest for the logo - because the logos suggested by the winning web site design were not good enough for us. (None of the other logos were either, but it would have been unfair to "steal" a logo idea from one of the other design proposals.

What was confusing was what to do after we got the first design proposal. crowdSPRING recommends that you respond quickly and rate the first proposal. We were concerned that this was unfair to the first designer - since our responses as well as the first design would be visible to other designers. It turns out that we could have sent the first designer a private message. But we didn't know that. And in the end, it is probably better for us to let everyone know what we think, so we will get the best design.

But I think the process is unfair to the designers. They wind up doing a lot of work and then having a later submitter see their work and submit a better design. Each submitter is required to assert: "I created everything in my entry and I didn't copy anyone else's concept." But I find it hard to believe they wouldn't be influenced by other designs.

Deliverables

The basic deliverable for a web site and other projects is a Photoshop .PSD file. This makes a lot of sense for a logo, but for a web site, I was concerned that the design may include items which are difficult to encode into the web site.

For example, the winning design had some non-uniform backgrounds, but we wanted to design the site so that it would expand to match the browser width. It would have been tricky to extract the images form the PSD file, and place them properly into the web site layout. Fortunately for us, the winning designer, provided us with a sample HTM page which included his backgrounds. This saved us hours of development time.

Second, the winning design used a special font - Blue Highway - for headings. You cannot simply choose a font for you web pages because if the font is not installed on the users machine, it will not appear. This was tricky because Blue Highway was installed on my machine (by pure luck), but when I tested the web site pages on other machines, the font did not show up.

We wound up purchasing server-side software from True Font Family which creates an image from text and a font, and displays the image on your site, e.g.,

(- the Blue Highway font creates the slanted descenders.)

We got this to work OK, but it added complexity to the project.

Closing the competition

After we got a few good designs, we wanted to choose one, and get started on the web site. (We are very impatient. Perhaps by waiting a few more days we would have found some better designs). It was unclear how to close the design. I finally discovered that we could request an early closure - and even then crowdSPRING make you wait an additional 23 hours.

However, now were had to figure things out with the winning designer. In particular, we want to make sure that we could get the images we needed to create the web site. He assured us that, after he got paid (he get paid by crowdSPRING, using our money, after we agree that the project is complete), he would send us any images we needed. We assured him that if he sent the images before final approval we would declare him the winner. In the end one of us (US), had to decide to trust the other party and complete the transaction.

Would I do it again?

I guess so, since we are running the second contest for logo designs.

I would suggest to crowdSPRING that they change their requirements for Web Design projects, and insist the the designers create a prototype web page for the images for their submissions, and then deliver the working prototype as the final design, rather than just the images.

Al Hart

We completed the site design contest, and then ran a second contest for a new logo:

renderplus.com

We're pretty pleased with the results and hope it will cause SketchUp users all over the world to have an improved opinion of us - at least from the first impressions of our web site.