A couple of months ago I launched a logo gallery project called Logospire. It’s been fairly successful so far and today has around 650 logos hosted on it. The feature that sets Logospire apart from other logo galleries is that you can submit a logo and have it displayed instantly on the gallery – all the moderation is done through user voting. Naturally, this attracts all sorts of logos, with quality levels that vary from great to not so great. I think it has worked ok so far, with better logos rising to the top and making the “Popular” section of the gallery worthwhile to browse.
As I began adding a few features to the site, I noticed that the old design wasn’t very accommodating. There wasn’t enough space for a longer pagination menu and the sorting controls were confusing. So I went ahead and redesigned the site. Here’s the version 2, which features a complete redesign and a couple of feature additions:
Firstly, there’s the new grid based layout which allows you to scan more logos faster. Secondly, the navigation area has a lot more space now and a “Rising” browsing mode has been added. This mode will float popular new logos to the top, similar to how a social news site works. Some of the back-end code has also been optimized, which means pages should load more quickly now.
One interesting thing I noticed was that people were trying to game the system to have their logo displayed on the front page. Some users made several accounts to vote their logo up. I’ve now added countermeasures that will help prevent this and keep low ranking logos off the front pages.
We’ll see how it does. I’m still unclear whether this user submitted and moderated model is a effective for something like a logo gallery or not as the quality levels do vary a lot, but apart from a few people trying to cheat I think it ran pretty well so far.
I invite you to visit Logospire and tell me what you think.