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CrowdSpring Used Competing Service To Design Its Own Logo

CrowdSpring is a company that allows businesses to use crowds of graphic designers to create logos, images for ads, and other artwork. They boast about how they used their own process to design their own logo, eventually awarding the project to a janitor who taught himself graphic design. It's a compelling story -- but it's not the whole story.

CrowdSpring is a community of graphic designers. When a company wants some design work done, it posts a write-up of what it wants on the CrowdSpring site, and designers do the work and then compete among themselves to see who gets to sell the project and get paid.

I wrote about CrowdSpring earlier this week, in a piece headlined: "DEMO: CrowdSpring Is Like eBay For Creative Professionals." I wrote: "CrowdSpring used its own service to design its Web site and logo. The company bought the logo from a 28-year-old janitor who taught himself graphic design."

But that's not entirely true. "They designed their logo using our service," said Mark Harbottle, founder of Sitepoint and 99designs, two online communities for designers based in Melbourne, Australia, in a phone interview. Harbottle e-mailed me after the first blog post to set the record straight.

CrowdSpring says, yes, that's the way it happened. "So, truth be told, yes - when the time eventually came to start CrowdSpring and before we'd built a single line of code, we did indeed use SitePoint for our logo. After all, how could a crowdsourcing creative marketplace later tell the world that they hired a single designer to do their own logo! :)," according to an e-mail from the account of CrowdSpring co-founder Ross Kimbarovsky and signed by Kimbarovsky and co-founder Mike Sampson.

I take errors seriously, and so I dug down to see how I made that one. My notes don't help much; I just have Kimbarovsky saying, "The person who designed our logo was a night janitor." I remember that Kimbarovsky and Sampson said that CrowdSpring used "the process" to design its logo, which led me to believe that they used their own service to design the logo, not the same process on a competing service.

I should have been more careful -- but so should CrowdSpring, because their language was downright Clintonian.

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