We’re putting together a simple landing page for the new business whilst we are still in development. It became clear to us recently that we needed a logo for that to give a sense of identity and also to direct the initial colour scheme of the prototype.

I have always liked the idea of sits like RentACoder and Elance for small bits of work but had never tried them. Anthony, down in Ummera, recently asked me for advice on a site re-design he was considering. In particular, he wanted to get rid of frames. One “expert” he encountered had offered to do the work, some SEO, some “links” and a few other trivial things and wanted well over a grand for the work. I thought it was crazy money and told him to have a look at Elance. He liked what he saw, put up a description of the work he wanted, got 14 replies and had exactly what he was looking for done in less than a week for €100 by some guys in India.

Due to his success, I decided to take this route for the logo on the basis that it may not be the one we launch with but at least it will look nice. I described the basic idea and the company name and some simple thoughts we had ourselves and within 24 hours had 11 bids ranging from €70 to €200. Most of them were clustered around the €100 mark and locations ranged from India to USA to Argentina back to Ireland.

In this case, the selection process was quite easy as we did it on the basis of the portfolios. In general the Indian ones were overly fussy and too detailed. The one that really leaped out at us was the Argentinian portfolio. They have a very strong theme to their design and you almost know that the work has a latin origin. Within four days they had the proposals back to us. Most of the vendors promise 4-6 samples and then infinite revisions on the one you pick. From what I can see they (quite reasonably) put all the effort into two whilst the others are pretty much throwaway. We loved the first option, got a few tiny tweaks and will have the final work in the next day or two.

I’m now completely sold on this idea and highly recommend it to anyone looking for low value, fast turn-around work. In fact, from now on, anytime I think I’ll do a bit of work on something, I’ll do an ROI on my time first and may shoot it over to Elance instead.

Technorati Tags: rentacoder, elance, odesk, outsourcing, graphic+design