Worked on a sweet logo design only to get rejected by a client? Enter it into the Rejected Logo Competition!
Enter your rejected logo and you could win a prize
The good people at Print Express do a lot of work with all kinds of designers, and so they like to get involved in the community and create things that designers might find useful, interesting or fun.
Last year, largely fuelled by reading Clients from Hell, they started thinking about all of the great logo design that doesn't get approved by the client, and so doesn't see the light of day.
"We thought: there must be tons of interesting pieces of artwork out there that's sadly gone unnoticed, and only really gets seen by the creator," explains Alex Black. "So we thought it'd be interesting to find that great work and reward it."
They went on to create the Rejected Logo Competition. "It's a competition that aims to find the best logo design that was ultimately turned down by the client, and instead of it being unused and unloved, we'd reward the creator with a whole range of prizes," he explains.
After a successful first run in 2014, with hundreds of entries, the competition is back for 2015, and you have just two weeks left to enter your designs.
Of last year's entries, Black has this to say: "There were a few things that cropped up that really surprised us, but the main thing that I personally learnt is just how many great logos don't get approved.
Check out the current entries on the competition website
"I expected that we'd get some well designed logos, but I also thought that most would be rejected for a good reason – but the interesting thing is that most of the designs were great.
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"And the other thing that surprised me was just how high the bar is set. A lot of the logos that were entered were incredibly good. Much, much better than what I'm able to design, and in a lot of cases, I was genuinely shocked that they'd been rejected."
"I suppose, ultimately, the main lesson that I learned from the Rejected Logo Competition is that a lot of design can be subjective – and that a logo that you think looks impressive, isn't necessarily impressive to the client."
Tom May is an award-winning journalist and author specialising in design, photography and technology. His latest book, The 50th Greatest Designers, was released in June 2025. He's also author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Great TED Talks: Creativity, published by Pavilion Books, Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine.
