Site update, August 2015

Logospire was launched in January of 2009, and was designed to be a site where designers could freely register, browse, and share their logos to inspire and be inspired. Up to now, over 12,000 logos have been submitted and displayed on the gallery pages.

While the site became popular, I ran into two problems, both sharing the same cause.

First of all, the voting system used to rank logos was constantly gamed by people registering multiple accounts. I did not build a strong system to protect against this because I did not see any reward in gaming a gallery site, certainly nothing that would provide a greater payoff than the time spent doing it. Unfortunately, this proved not to be the case.

The second problem was that people submitted spam entries in order to insert links to their sites. I anticipated this spam and hoped that the voting system would suppress it. In addition, the links themselves were useless for search ranking purposes as they were all set to "nofollow", i.e. disregarded by search engine bots. Generally, the noise could be surpressed by voting, but, not surprisingly, spam kept flowing.

As a quick fix I created a curated section on the gallery where I manually featured the logos I liked. This prevented people from gaming the front page and kept the quality level high. At the same time, this also negated the whole point of a public gallery. Since there are other curated galleries out there, switching the focus on curation took away the differentiating feature of the site. I guess the lesson here is that unless you have a sufficiently large body of users, curation is the better choice, that is, manual curation of content or invite based registrations.

I no longer have the time or the energy to curate and maintain the site and I do not wish to the see it degrade through neglect. At the same time, I do not wish to shut the site down completely because the gallery has collected a lot of inspiring work, work that still has value to new visitors.

As a solution I am slimming down the site, preserving the best of the work for new visitors in a simpler design. There is no more voting or user submission or individual logo pages, just a single page, endless-scrolling gallery, with all the top logos sorted by their acquired votes, with precedence being given to featured logos. So while the site will stay open, the project may be said to be completed. Big thank you to all the designers who submitted their work to the gallery, as well as those who took their time to vote.

- Dmitry

P.S. If you are the creator or copyright owner of one of the logos and no longer wish to see it featured, please let me know by dropping me an email.