Created as a competition entry. Design Crowd was not a client and did not commission this work. Contest Platform.
Design Crowd was a contest-based platform that connected clients with creatives through open design competitions. The format was the same as Blank You Very Much: a client posted a brief, designers submitted work, and the client picked a winner. The difference was scope — Design Crowd ran logo contests for small businesses and startups, not brand campaigns for major labels. Each brief was a single mark: a company's entire identity compressed into one readable symbol.
I submitted work for over twenty clients between 2013 and 2014. The briefs ranged from a probate firm that wanted a quill pen to a honey brand that needed an artisan feel to a cannabis delivery business looking for a leaf-and-cross mark. Some came with reference images and competitor analysis. Some came with a name and a sentence. The constraint was always the same: the logo had to read at business card size and billboard size, in one color and full color, on a website and on a delivery truck.
I didn't win any of the contests. But the range was the point — twenty-four identity systems across industries that had nothing in common, each one a different design problem with a different set of constraints.
The bulk of the work was identity systems for small businesses and professional services. Each one started from the client's brief and ended as a finished mark built in Illustrator.
The EF monogram was a clean interlocking letter treatment for a professional services firm. The Resonance Center used concentric sound wave rings for an audiology medical facility. Royal Velvet paired a honey dipper illustration with elegant serif typography for a line of honey products. Peninsula on the Intracoastal used a flamingo standing in shallow water for a 55+ living community in Florida. Simply Probate took a quill pen writing in ink for a probate services firm, giving the piece an old-world feel. Traemand built a stylized tree with exposed roots for a paper company. Greenlife Express integrated a cannabis leaf into a medical cross for a cannabis delivery business. On Your Marks combined a racing starter pistol with track elements for a learning assessment system for children.
IQra was an educational platform that needed a full identity system — the logo, an open book with a diagonal slash element, came with a seven-page presentation showing the mark across touchpoints. Otto was a stencil-cut wordmark in industrial lettering for a manufacturing brand. SAEM used a circular emblem with academic seal treatment for a professional association. SARA built a surveyor's compass rose with crosshair detailing for a land surveying brand. Store2Door combined a house and arrow suggesting delivery from retail to home.
Haughton used an architectural crest with a serif wordmark for an estate identity. JG set a monogram against a Singapore skyline for a label brand. BidBuddy combined an auction gavel with a speech bubble for a bidding assistant platform. My Surgical Cost placed a medical cross over a US map for a surgical cost comparison service.
