fiverr Archives - The Occasional Thoughts of Shane Greenup

December 22, 2011

The Fiverr Design Experiment

Attempting to get a good business card design for Immortal Outdoors I have opted to experiment with crowd-sourcing design through Fiverr. I have hired the following people through their advertised gigs:

iambdus, boyluiji, and oneream.

Total time = about 30-45 minutes to casually find the jobs, pay for them and describe what I wanted to each of them.

Total cost = $15

First Result

Boyluji was the first to deliver, taking almost exactly 24h from my deliver of the specs of the job. He asked for:

provide me your details such as:
Logo
Desired card Details
color preferences

and receive a business card design in printable format.

and I provided:

Colors – Please stick with the color theme on the website (visible here: http://immortal-test.mycms.com.au/) and in the logo.

Slogan/Phrase “Mapping the Outdoors”

Card details should be:

Shane Greenup
email provided
http://www.ImmortalOutdoors.com
+61 413 295 020

I received:

To which I messaged back to him:

OK that is really really ugly. Can I get a complete redesign, this time focusing on the brand (this is a card for my website, on which my details are present. Like most ‘Business’ cards) also actually sticking with the colour scheme and theme of the logo and the website I directed you to.

*fingers crossed*

Which I think you will agree is pretty accurate. That design is bad on so many levels. It was a little heart breaking to get such a horrible design. I mean, sticking the logo on it and writing my details in whatever the default font was would look better and take much less time. So anyway, he replied with:

ok no worries communication is key i will do a complete re design you should have results soon.

and delivered the following solution:

Which was a significant improvement, but still didn’t work for me at all. I thought it focused too much on my name, while the focus is meant to be on the Website Logo. So I left it at that (since I had used up my $5 worth of design and revision anyway), and awaited the other two designs…

Second Result

Iamabdus delivered second. Now I have had a gig delivered by Iamabdus previously, he designed the logo for The Traveller’s Trade, which was quick and effective, so I was already quite happy with his work. I was hoping he could deliver just as effectively on the business card design too.

His request for information was:

Just send me:
(1) Logo
(2) Your name, designation, address and all info
(3) Any sample design.

Note: All source files will be provided

To which I replied with:

1. Logo attached.

2. Shane Greenup
*email provided*
www.ImmortalOutdoors.com
+61 413 295 020

3. The card is for the following website: http://immortal-test.mycms.com.au/ Take design elements from that as inspiration. Is that enough?

Thanks,
Shane
(from http://www.travellerstrade.com)

And the final product was delivered in just under 48 hours from my sending of that information, and looked like this:

Which is immediately better than the previous efforts by the last designer, and I sort of like it, but it doesn’t stay true to the overall colour theme of the website, so I wasn’t sure. Plus it was only one side of the card, and I really did want a double sided card design. So I was thinking that Iamabdus is definitely ahead at this stage, I would await the results of designer 3 before deciding on what to do.

Third Result

OneReam was the final designer expected to deliver, advertising a delivery period of 5 days to deliver, but after 6 days nothing was heard from them, so I messaged them asking if they were there.. 6 days later I got a message saying that they had had a family emergency, and asking if I wanted them to proceed or not, so I said “Sure, why not” and awaited the delivery of my designs.

Within 24 hours of that message, I got her designs. This time, instead of just getting a PNG file (like the previous two designers), she provided a zip file filled with print ready PDFs and adobe illustrator working files (and fonts used), and not just for one design, but two designs of a double sided card. All provided for MacOS as well as PC. So that was quite impressive. Better still, the designs were actualyl pretty good! They kept to the colour theme of the website, and focussed on the website logo and domain, while still providing my personal details in an effective manner.

Final Outcome

Anyway, so they were the results from my 3 Fiverr gigs. I was going to pick the best and give them the specifics that I wanted, but I have decided to just make some slight changes to the last set of designs, since I am mostly happy with them.

I really gotta go and do some real work now…

Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)

December 9, 2011

Not Fast Enough!

I just purchased a ‘gig’ off Fiverr.com (liking this website more and more these days) and after a total period of about 20 seconds where I had to enter my Paypal password, and click ‘confirm’ or whatever button I had to press, I was redirected back to this page on Fiverr:

Did you know that you could order much quicker!?!?! Did you know that 20 seconds to complete a payment is wasting your time? Wow.

I mean, I’m generally quite a speed orientated person. I like to be fast, and I hate to wait – but “Omg this is slow” is not what I was thinking when I was processing that payment for 20 seconds.

Anyway, just found it funny how focussed the internet has made us on shaving seconds off simple activities…

Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)

June 9, 2011

Web Social Phenomenons

I have just been getting myself aquianted with a couple of recent web phenomenons. Fiverr isn’t exactly new, but it is still a very current trend which I definitely think deserve classifying within the realm of ‘most recent’ internet trends. In case you don’t know what Fiverr.com is, it is all about ‘what would you do for a fiver?’ Basically, it is a giant list of ‘services’ of sorts being offered for the price of $5. And of course, you can request services for $5 too, if you can’t find exactly what you are looking for.

I think I like this website and trend. Superficially it seems to offer a LOT of really useful services for very cheap. And if you can use any of those services, then they are all bargains. I have taken a few deals out already, but am still waiting for delivery of them all, so I will have to report in again on what I thought of those services. I hope to continue exploring and finding really good services through fiverr for a while to come.

The second phenomenon I have found, thanks to Fiverr, is called Twiends. Now this one I am far less sure about. In fact, I am pretty sure it highlights exactly my biggest complaint and annoyance with the overall social phenomenon scene created by Facebook and Twitter et al. That you end up with giant crowds of people – who don’t really care…

I guess I will have to explain this – How Twiends works, is basically you follow people on twitter, or like pages on facebook and in return you get ‘seeds’. These seeds then allow you to ‘pay’ other people to follow your twitter account and like your facebook page. Pretty simple, apparently completely within T&C of both organisations (since they aren’t actually being ‘bought’ or ‘sold’) but completely pointless too…? I mean, what is the point of getting people to follow you who are only following you so they can get more people to follow them… Surely the people who have blindly followed you have blindly followed many other people too? So how are your tweets and updates even going to get through the noise of all of their other follows and likes???

The analogy which comes to mind is of these social networks being like a large party, where there might be 1000 people, but everyone self-organises in to smaller social circles where they can have discussions with one another. You can’t talk to everyone, but at least the 5-10 people in your circle can hear you. But with Twiends, it feels like we are trying to turn that party in to a rave where everyone is free to talk, but it is so noisy, no one can hear anyone at all. You might accidentally hear what the raver next to you says, but it is by accident more than design.

What is the point of all of it all anyway?

Rating: 1.0/10 (1 vote cast)