Croudsourcing Your Personal Brand

Sometimes I laugh when people seem so shocked about the idea of crowdsourcing, because really, you are doing something people have done for ages -- asking someone else's opinion. Just this time, it's on a larger, and more public scale.

No matter what we say, we all worry about what people think, and by crowdsourcing you are able to put something out there and get criticism and complements on a project, idea, logo or whatever, before actually sinking money, or making a strong commitment, into it.

I've crowdsourced for brands before, but this was the first time I crowdsourced something for one of my personal brands. It was a magnet design for The Adirondack Chick, my food, travel and outdoors website.

A little background -- the magnets will be put in gift bags at an event I'm speaking at in the Adirondacks next month. While I'm speaking about social media during the wellness weekend, it seemed more appropriate to add something to the bags that was more closely related to my Adirondack Chick site, since all of the attendees are females, and well, we will be in the Adirondacks.

Here were the three designs I placed on my personal Facebook page and asked friends their opinion:

I was absolutely in love with the first design, but several people pointed out they thought part of the word Adirondack was lost in the center of the flower. After playing around with it and looking at it printed, they were right. So, we went back to the drawing board, aka Photoshop.

We played around with the shadows and other font, but it still wasn't working out as nicely as we planned. Instead, we decided to take a page from my business card, and move the sunflower image - which by the way, was actually grown in the Adirondacks in my garden - to the side and layer just a portion of the wording over it leaving a little white space.

After uploading the second and third one, we got great feedback on the third image, and because we had to make a decision ASAP, because of deadlines, went with it. 

I'm very pleased with the final results, and am really glad I asked for other people's opinions.