Python for Entrepreneurs Transcripts
Chapter: Getting help (contracting, design, and more)
Lecture: Python Bytes at 99designs
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0:00
So let's look behind the scenes at my account at 99designs. I launched my newest podcast, Python Bytes,
0:08
which is like latest news and headlines show for the Python community. I had no idea what I should use for a logo but I knew that I did not want
0:18
yet another "go to Python.org get the main logo and put the microphone by it",
0:24
or something silly based on that, I wanted something creative and unique. And I am pretty decent at web design, I am not very decent at graphic arts.
0:31
I knew I needed to get help, so here is an ad I posted a while ago, or a contest as they call them here.
0:38
And you can see it's 699 dollars and that is kid of expensive but that's a bit of a premium pack, I think you can do it for like 399 dollars,
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something to that effect, but I wanted a few extra things as well as
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I wanted to pay just a little bit more to get some of the better artists to come along,
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and you can also guarantee it, that means you are going to start the contest and you promise to pay somebody 700 dollars
1:03
at the end regardless of what happens. and, that's a bit of a risk, but I had good experience with 99designs before and you'll get better artists,
1:12
and you'll get more people participating if you do that. So here you can see I've awarded a winner, this guy was really good,
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and you can see here is what it is, I want Python Bytes podcast logo on social media, I currently run this podcast etc,
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so I talk about here is the background information, I run this other one, here is the things I am going to need, and so on, and here is how it works.
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It takes you through and says how much do you like modern versus classical, mature versus youthful, like which way are you going?
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Are you going for a sophisticated design or a playful fun design and so on.
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It asks you all these questions when you get started, and then, more importantly,
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it shows you a bunch of various designs and then you could say "I like this one, I don't like this one, I like this one, I really like this one,
1:57
I really don't like that one", and then, this stuff is supplied to the artists,
2:00
in the beginning, like oh, I really like this one, if I had something like this for Python,
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maybe I'd be happy, right, so they can use that to kind of get a sense for what visually you are looking for.
2:11
So I created this contest and I ran it only for, I think I ran it for three days, it could run for either a week or two weeks, I don't recall but,
2:19
you can run it for a while and I actually stopped it earlier because I was really pleased with one of the designs and I was feeling increasingly bad
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as more and more people were doing work and submitting designs "I am like, no, none of these are even close to the one that I chose in my opinion".
2:36
I could have gotten a lot more submissions by letting it play out over time, but let me go ahead and show you what I did get.
2:43
So here I am going to flip through these designs, you can see I said "no, I am not interested in this", so this one did not speak to me, look at this,
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like what is that, a cactus? No, I think it's microphone, there seems to be a snake embedded in the middle but what's the other stuff,
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this doesn't make any sense, but let me just flip through a few. This is the one, the design that I actually picked, but not in its original form,
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I went to this guy and said hey this is really cool and clever, could you give this to me on white, and in a few other formats?
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So I really liked this one, here is a few other, he also submitted this in the beginning. This one, actually this one is OK, but I don't know,
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it's still just like a basic remixing of that logo and there is rules like legal copyright protection trademark protection I guess,
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against remixing the Python logo as I found out, long story, but, these are not bad but I think they break that rule so I couldn't pick them.
3:38
This one was pretty cool, but one of the things I did that didn't think through
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when I first put the contest together is that it asks you is this a blind contest or can the artists see each other's submissions as they come in.
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And they saw that I liked the submission with this snake and the bars, and this guy or a girl immediately started making other designs
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with that exact same thing and so this is pretty clever, I really thought well they just like basically, literally ripped off
4:05
that guy's idea about the snake, and then started incorporating it. So in the future I would actually create blind contest
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where the designers can't see each other's work, but once you've started the contest, you can't change it, so I was kind of stuck with that.
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Again, just remixes of the Python logo, I think this is actually against the trademark.
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This one I actually liked pretty well, but again, it was against the trademark of the Python organization, so I couldn't use it.
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So now, we are starting to narrow in on the final design that I really liked, see different colors, a little bit of feedback,
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could you do it on the white, things like this. And then, here is the final design that I went with.
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Oh I chose this guy as the winner, we worked back and forth for three or four days and they ended up delivering all the various sizes and styles
5:05
that I needed to get the website launched, and if you look at the final product, here is the website, the final product on Pythonbytes.fm with the logo
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and the design that I got from 99designs. Now, I got this picture here in the center, and I got that little icon at the top left
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but other than that, I designed the whole page using bootstrap and themes and so on, but if you look throughout the site you can see
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how the sparse white background of the design and the colors were really central to the rest of the web design, so once I had this design I'm like "oh,
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I think I can totally design the site around this and make it look really good", so over here you can see a lot of the colors
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that come from here, over there, things like that. So 99designs, I've had two contests there and they have both come out really well,
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so that's not a huge sampling but my experience has been it's been a great place
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to get help for graphic design, especially when you don't really know what you want,
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because you get many submissions and then you can work with artists over time
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to get what you want, rather than picking an artist and trying to work with them until you come up with something,
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you can get a bunch of different submissions and ideas all at once.