$400 logo design contest.
"we wanted to find a way to give some excellent designers exposure"

Network Solutions & Outright.com are sponsoring a $400 logo design contest for an "Unintentional Entrepreneur" blog and series of events.

According to the "Unintentional Entrepreneur" blog

Redesign the logo featured here and on our community and proudly affirm, “I too am an Unintentional Entrepreneur!”

The contest, which ends mid day on July 13th, will award $400 to the best design, with the award winner having their logo featured above. We’ve joined the fantastic designers and artists at [design conest site] to host the contest; they’ll be bringing their best designers to bear so put your best foot forward. Throughout the next two weeks, stay tuned as we present our favorites for review and comment. Let us know what you think and we’ll give the designers a chance to tweak their submissions.

The post features several critical comments

$400 ‘award’ is NOT enough compensation! Weak Netsol! You are using crowd-sourcing as total theft! Don’t take advantage. Boo on this one.

And

So, you get a cheap logo design from a designer who for some reason isn’t in high demand (or they’d be doing paid work), and countless other designers without much work on offer you their services for no financial or portfolio-based gain whatsoever. Everyone loses! Nice work.

As a result of designer "attention" on Twitter, another post entitled "Unintentional Misunderstanding" was published on their blog

Our logo contest for the Unintentional Entrepreneur Workshop got a little attention in Twitter today, but for all the wrong reasons. We are holding a contest to design the logo for this event blog.

This blog was created to support a series of events for self-employed professionals, side business owners, recently laid-off employees and freelancers who have marketable skills, experience and knowledge that they are using to start or run their own businesses during the economic downturn.

Network Solutions and Outright.com got together to host a series of free workshops to support these individuals. The workshops will be coming to you in a five-city tour of Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. Unintentional Entrepreneurs will learn from veteran entrepreneurs, network with local small business owners and gain insight about:

Frankly, we have all the internal resources to support this blog, including its design, but we wanted to find a way to give some excellent designers exposure.

Our first post about [designer] showcases the designer, and we will be following up with profiles on the other designers that we like. The winner has not been chosen, the contest is ongoing and we will be featuring the favorite entries over the next few weeks.

According to Wikipedia,

"On February 6, 2007, Network Solutions announced that General Atlantic, a private equity firm, entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Network Solutions from Najafi Companies (formerly Pivotal Private Equity). [4] Although terms of the deal were not released, the Wall Street Journal reported in a story on May 30, 2007 that the price tag was "around $800 million"