So many inspirational sites have sprung up recently. The web is crawling with CSS galleries and logo galleries, but only a few really break the mold and stand out as the most creative, inspiring, and useful collections. LogoMoose makes it to the top of my list.
I’ve been checking out the site for a while now, mostly when I’m working on design mockups for site’s. The inspiration on the site seems never-ending and I have nothing but good things to say about it. I had a talk with the site’s creator and designer Dirk Leys, and he had a few great things to say about the site.
Where did you get the inspiration for creating a unique website such as LogoMoose?
The idea was to create an overview of excellent logo designs for personal inspiration. When I noticed that more and more designers preferred that list I started to let others submit their logos. Before I knew it, it became a busy inspiration site.
Over the past year the website started growing and growing. I’ve added a blog, a job board and a directory to make it more interactive for all the visitors.
How did you come up with the name? Pretty original idea, if you ask me!
A moose is, at first sight, a pretty frightening animal. The thing is that when you create a character out of a moose it becomes a very cute animal. The same thing goes with logos. The purpose of a logo is to gain recognition. The logo itself and the thoughts behind it create a message to the viewers about the company.
That is why logos are so important. A logo that isn’t communicating the company properly could be bad for business.
How do you deal with spam and poor-quality submissions to LogoMoose?
The logos that are being submitted via the submission form are emailed to me. The badly designed ones, wrong sizes or wrong file format get deleted instantly. The proper logos are added to the waiting list. As I’m only adding three new logos to the gallery each day, the waiting list is becoming bigger and bigger (at the moment there are almost 500 logos waiting to be added to the gallery).
How much traffic does LogoMoose get, on average? Do you see any trends or predict traffic increasing in the near future?
The traffic has been growing each month since the start in November 2008, except for December 2009 due to the busy holidays. The average numbers are now at almost 50,000 unique visitors and almost 250,000 page views each month and still growing.
I also noticed you have a blog on LogoMoose. Do you find that your posts bring in a lot of attention to the site? And how do you come up with topics to post about?
The idea for the blog was to archive logos into groups so that the visitors didn’t have to search the whole site to find a particular logo. I also find it useful to give my visitors some updates by posting about the new additions to the site. I am however interested into making the posts more logo and branding related with some interviews, design processes and much more.
LogoMoose is also running a small job board, which I found very interesting. Can you explain a bit how that works, and does LogoMoose make any money off of jobs being posted?
Most of my visitors are designers (particularly logo designers) looking for inspiration. All these designers are also looking for new projects and clients to work with. The problem is that these clients can sometimes be hard to find. This is when I thought that I could be able to help them out with. As I already have lots of designers visiting the website, a person looking for a logo designer would have many to choose from.
The job board is still very young so I hope to see more job ads being posted pretty soon. As for now, it’s a free service.
Do you make enough money from LogoMoose to sustain the hosting and domain costs comfortably? Can you see turning LogoMoose into a profitable website?
At the moment the ads are bringing in more than enough to keep the website up. Everything that is extra will be going to the big updates that I’ve planned. This includes a new layout and a better backend for the website (it’s a mess right now because of all the small updates from the past year). Once this is done, I’m sure I can turn it into a profitable website and get some value for the time I put into it.
Aside from hanging out on LogoMoose, where else do you go online?
I spent a lot of time on Twitter visiting interesting blog posts on branding en web design. Some of the websites that I frequently visit are FreelanceSwitch, Webdesigner Depot, Vectortuts and a forum called DesignersTalk(which is full of amazingly sarcastic, brutally honest and skilled designers).
What is one great lesson you’ve learned since starting and running LogoMoose?
Your visitors are those that make or break your website. Giving them a platform to show of their work (gallery), helping them find work (job board), letting them have a backlink to their portfolio (logo designer directory) and giving them some logo and branding information and inspiration through the blog has helped a lot. In the end, it’s the visitors that make or break a website.
