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Hiring Artists for Open Source Projects?
MikeFM asks: "What is the best way for an Open Source developer to hire artists to provide graphics, music, and other artwork for Open Source projects? I need to hire such people and I'm not sure where to go or how best to spell out the terms of the contract so that it's okay to release the works for hire as Open Source. I'm willing to pay but can't afford to pay a lot. It seems to me that providing artwork for an Open Source project sounds like great exposure to art students and artists still early in their career but how do I find these people? I've posted ads in the local schools and art stores.. what else can I do?"
You of course have all the terms up front and clear?
Explain what OSS is and why it's in their interest to contribute (money will only go so far in facilitating this goal)?
working with graphics etc.
Though all I have taken was the first CG class, and the rest after was self taught. Since it was just a hobby, and not somthing I wanted a career in.
If your work isn't too intricate beyond my skills, I will be glad to help out.
email: codedemon @ gmail . com
You could post on a site that gets a lot of geek exposure.
hey, how about slashdot?
WTPOUAWYHTTOTWPA
What's the point of using acronyms when you have to type out the whole phrase anyways?
I have a friend who could do some good design work for you. If you like, I can put you in touch with her. Go to my website at zesty.ca and scroll down to see my e-mail address.
Hit the art colleges during open houses or design shows... take a look around and talk to the students... Don't count on anyone calling you from any adds you take out. Artists and designers want to know what is in it for them... The best thing to do as far as the contract is concerned is to offer to pay them, you retain rights to use and distribute anything they 'sell' to you, but they retain rights to use the 'work' they produce in their portfolio... you can also pro-offer to supply them with a free finished product, as well as liner or some form of hard copy with their name on it. Things like that go a long way to getting designers or artists to hand over work. As long as their 'signature' ends up somewhere in the finished product hard coded (read printed in a booklet somewhere), they are usually happy.
As for artistic freedom, that is a whole different kettle of fish... Try to let them do what they do best and stay out of their way only offering direction. Try to arrange work previews during the buildup and don't hit them with 'buts' use 'ands' to direct their work. You will find that you get much better end results that way
Best of luck.
flinging poop since 1969
You can start by browsing already "open sourced" works at opart.org and opsound.org. If you cannot find anything pre-existing to fit your needs, you will at least find a community of artisans who embrace open source principles. You'll also want to consult creative commons for the various free asin speech liscenses for the various mediums of art you'll be using.
I think you'll find that most open source artists, as with most open source developers are not seeking to be financially compensated directly, though are open for donations.
I myself am an "open source" musician and have contributed music to a few open source projects: SonarBuoyix and Tong.
They're full of artists, waiting on tables. No, wait, those are actors.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
For some reason, crowds like the furries are really into Linux, and you'd probably find a lot of people willing to work free or cheap just by going to Yerf or similar and wading through for the one strong technical artist in 50.
Post want-ads on graphics Internet boards. Search the web to find graphics boards. Here are a few to get you started:
CGTalk
Polycount
And there are many others out there. Many have help-wanted boards.
Just use a standard work-for-hire type contract. That is, you will own the copyright. Then you can do whatever you want with it (like release under an open-source license). This is just standard practice for contract work of any type. There are lots of contract templates on the web and just about all of them assign copyright of created works to the person/company paying for it.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
There are plenty of people here offering suggestions on where to find free labor, but if you actually hire someone, then you can do whatever the hell you want with the work they've done--opensource it, burn it, throw it to the dogs--it's no different from source code.
Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
just remember that artists have a very different mindset than coders, and will be far less open to opensource (at least in my experience as a professional code monkey at a small game developer).
Of course, you could pay for their art, agree to royalties, and then just change it 20 percent (by putting a filter or bilinear mask of sorts on it) and skrew them outta the royalties like an evil company that shall remain nameless that i know of does (or did in the past).
DONT PANIC
Be careful around universities with "art departments". They often like to saturate the faculty, administration and students with the notion that Art is Good and Holy, that science is somehow tainted, and that engineering and technology (and of course computing) is generally icky and nasty.
Sound a bit testy do I?
I spent four years at a university that advertised CS degrees, and that fostered that attitude big time. The CS budget was routinely scavanged for computers to support art classes (they were computers though and therefore somehow CS), the CS faculty people were lucky to last a year before being tossed out and the artists puffed themselves up and told all and sundry how great they were.
Art students were told bluntly that math and science were beneath them. At their senior shows, art students liked to price the cheeziest bit of crap at several thousands of dollars and many went off to sell similarly cheezy crap to corporations for even more inflated prices.
CS majors graduated with debts and little hope of finding jobs, having graduated from a school that was only slightly better rated than
East Podunk Middle School for the Terminally Obtuse.
</rant>
If you need 3d characters or assets (including texture/bump maps and such), I can do just about any modelling/rigging/animation in any format that Maya can export (or for which specs can be provided, so I can write a translator). And seeing as how I'm a student currently on summer break, I have plenty of spare time and don't expect to be paid much, if anything.
Interested? Shoot me an email: sabretooth@gmail.com
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
I know a few hungry artists and musicians.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Surf the net for indie game houses. A lot of them post 'how to be an indie developer' pages, and a lot of indie developers outsource their art and sound development to russia, romania, india, pakistan, vietnam, guatemala, etc.
Post a project on rentacoder or guru and the 'low end' artists from those countries will come to you to bid on your project in droves. Pennies on the dollar, my friend.
Vonnegut was right: Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been."
I compose music for TV shows for a living. I can afford to work for free or very little on a limited amount of projects. email me at:
littlerubberfeet (at) yahoo (d0t) com
Otherwise, read the above post about getting students and student artists to pitch in.
In any case, good luck!
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
I actually called up the Intellectual Property Office once and they told me that there is no 20 percent rule. It's a myth. The IP people consider a multitude of factors -- although it *is* possible to change an image enough to have it qualify as a new image. Part of the test involves determining whether the image appears to be based on the original.
-- SYS 64738 --
But I'm a newcomer to the design thing (mostly web stuff) and wouldn't mind doing some work on the cheap.
e-mail me at the address above.
_g
"It'll destroy you if you try to make it mean anything to anyone but yourself." - Henry Rollins
I would begin by realizing that what you're describing is probably not a work for hire, and thus would result in your being fucked.
17 USC 101 defines a work made for hire, and it is very strict. As a rule of thumb, you should not assume works are works made for hire unless the person making them is your employee, not a contractor, and the works are being made in the scope of the employment. Typically, someone is your employee if they're working for you permanently, you withhold their taxes, and so forth. Commissioned works are hardly ever works made for hire.
So instead, you probably want a copyright assignment clause in a contract with contracted artists. This needs to be in writing, should be very explicit, and must be a proper contract: in exchange for consideration, signed, etc. See 17 USC 204-205. And don't forget to register the copyrights with the US Copyright Office, lest they not be worth shit.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I'm part designer, part 3D artist by day, and at night (when I have any energy left) I "just draw" on the old Wacom tablet, usually.
What grabs me? Well, money is nice but frankly, I don't need it. What I'd like to contribute to is a project I see value in. Something that will let me learn the ropes of what it's like to work with other people through the OSS model, because I never have before; I've only ever been a corporate monkey where the dynamics are presumably quite different.
That said, there aren't many projects that have grabbed me by the collar and said, "WE NEED YOU TO HELP US MAKE IT LOOK GOOD." The only apps that I've ever considered helping out with were Inkscape which shows a lot of promise for a vector graphics drawing package -- but isn't looking for designers as their road map is mostly replete with "stuff needs to be reprogrammed"; and Freevo, which blatently advertises that they're looking for (skin) designers. I think I'll be helping design a few skins for Freevo, because they look like they really want it, and I love the package and want to give something back to that community.
Since your project isn't done yet, selling on the basis of "giving back" because people like your project is pretty unlikely. That doesn't mean you might not gain a little interest by publicising what it's all about, though. Worst-case scenario, it's really dull and the requests are few -- at least the people that do volunteer will be in for the long haul, whereas signing up sight-unseen might result in a few people abandoning ship early on.
1. Find which edge of earth artwiz fell off.
2. Make him do it.
"when life gets complicated, I like to take a nap in a tree and wait for dinner" - Hobbes.
I'm working on a coding project I needed a cheap or free logo for, and I had a friend who was (really) desparate for a new computer. He had GIMP skills and I had a stripped down eMachines box to get arid of. Worked out great.
Just submit your job offers directly to this website. You'll save them the trouble of tracking down your job offer and subjecting it to humiliating attention. Be sure to come visit the chat boards so we can abuse you personally, ya cheap bastard.
Your request is similar to what I see over and over on FTJ. For some reason people think that students or unemployed artists and designers feel like giving away their labor for nothing. For example, someone found a job offer up on Craig's List seeking a candidate with skills in Photoshop & Illustrator, LiveMotion, Premier, FireworksMX, FlashMX, DreamweaverMX & FrontPage, HomeSite, JavaScript, ASP/php, and MS IIS. For all this, they want to pay $8 per hour. Sorry, not going to happen. Fortunately Craig's List prohibits this sort of exploitive ad and removed it from their listings.
No, you don't get a free ride because you are producing an open source project. If you want professional quality, you'll have to pay professionals at the going rate. No, art students don't want to give you free work in exchange for a portfolio piece, they can crank out any portfolio piece they like without having to meet the demands of a cheap client. Being an art student is very expensive, art supplies and materials cost real money (yes, even computers and software).
"Your request is similar to what I see over and over on FTJ. For some reason people think that students or unemployed artists and designers feel like giving away their labor for nothing."
, Cocoon, and will work for peanuts in a bad economy.
Sorry about that. Must be a carryover from the "information just wants to be free" meme.
"For example, someone found a job offer up on Craig's List seeking a candidate with skills in Photoshop & Illustrator, LiveMotion, Premier, FireworksMX, FlashMX, DreamweaverMX & FrontPage, HomeSite, JavaScript, ASP/php, and MS IIS. For all this, they want to pay $8 per hour. Sorry, not going to happen. Fortunately Craig's List prohibits this sort of exploitive ad and removed it from their listings."
Must have several years of experience with Java,PHP,Apache,(X)HTML,JSP,Perl,MySQL,Javascript
" No, art students don't want to give you free work in exchange for a portfolio piece, they can crank out any portfolio piece they like without having to meet the demands of a cheap client."
The age old question. Who needs whom? Musicians listen up.
"Being an art student is very expensive, art supplies and materials cost real money (yes, even computers and software)."
And yet people want free movies, music, games, and books.
There are thousands, and thousands of artists/musicians out on the 'net who would love to work on an Open Source-style project that can be used to promote their works. You don't need to hire them, necessarily, though you can of course. But most would love to do it just for the 'excercising of chops' such a project would provide
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
These could apply to artists too...
What is the best way for an Open Source developer to hire artists to provide graphics
Amass lots of money.
Programmers might be elusive enough to offer their work for free for some elusive goal, but others are not likely to fall for such stupidity.
Let's face it: you want high quality products, you have to pay for it. A free Linux kernel doesn't change that. Make your art copyrighted and hold onto it - and make it good for once. The entire open source movement is suffering not from a lack of results from Linus (duh) but from lackluster add-ons such as the GUIs/desktops. These products look downright UGLY.
If there's any way to pay Linus back for all the hard work he's done (for free) it's to dress his product in some fancy threads. And that means:
1. Accepting and preserving the fact that the Linux kernel is open source and free even as in beer.
2. Making some really HOT products around it - COMMERCIAL products, really flashy good products. With excellent artwork, etc.
People see artwork. They don't see kernel threads.
I beg to differ. You could level the same argument against computer programmers, yet there is a huge amount of free labor to be found from hobbyist programmers, even ones who are professionals and have loads of experience. Many people just like to be involved in fun projects, and some people feel a strong social commitment to "open source" or "free software" or even "free art."
Personally (as artist and programmer!) I prefer to work on my own projects, but if the project were cool enough, I wouldn't feel cheated to work on it for no pay.
You could always put a job up for auction at sites like Freelance Auction or Rent A Coder. You put a cap on how much you're willing to pay for your graphics, and let bidders compete for the job.
Siggy Wiggy Figgy Tiggy a bana bo Biggy!
Deviant Art is a great website and resource for digital art. There are many gifted artist there that have the digital artist's equivalent of an open source community. They share their work and post tutorials. There are many people there that are willing to work for close to nothing just to help a good cause and to get more for their portfolio. Give it a look - Deviant Art
Perhaps some well meaning geek on slashdot could develop a site where people looking for artistic talent could list what exactly they were looking for (CG folks, musicians, etc), what kind of project (game or app), what type of compensation they can offer (fame?, or a few sheckles) and some details about what they envision, and "artists" who have registered with the site can just click a link and their details are emailed to the contact for the project, or even better, artists who register could receive automatic emails if a new project is entered that matches their skill set (pick list of your skills and type of project/compensation you prefer). I would not imagine that this would take longer than a good weekend.
Perhaps some OSS advocates with a server could even host it for free, I also can't imagine that it would take a particularly large amount of resources.
I reject your reality
Hire Yahir Vite http://www.yahirvite.com/. He is very reasonable and extremely well respected.
What, you too are behind some corporate non-disclosure agreement? Although if you're working on OSS it shouldn't be the case...
Don't you think that one step towards getting some people that would want to participate in whatever you're working on would be to tell them WHAT it is?
Just dress in black and hang around coffee houses.
Or, you could do what we do at spamgourmet -- that is, go ahead and put up artwork that the developers did. It looks so bad that the artists will volunteer to rework it all (we're currently undergoing a rework now :)).
The new site will definitetly have links to the artist's site, so there's some no-cost promotion involved.
So...
1) get out the crayons and the scanner
2) slap something up
3) sit back and wait, countering frequent expressions of ridicule with offers to volunteer
4) art!
who's moderating the meta-moderators?
how con no-one have mentioned deviantart.com? definitely the biggest collection of indie artists ive ever seen. There is a hugh amount of amazing talent on that site that posts their work on deviant art for free, im sure that someone of its 6 million art pieces (while a fair bit of it is crap, at least the top third of it is jaw droppingly good) would help out either gratis or for a small fee.
http://www.gfxartist.com
http://www.sijun.com
http://www.conceptart.org
http://www.eatpoo.com
The first thing you can do to turn any artist off to your project is to tell them how much "exposure" it will net them. If I had a nickel for every time Joe Open Source told me his great project would get me "exposure" I'd be a millionaire. PS: I'm still waiting for the exposure, and so are a lot of other artists.
So, let me see if I can rephrase your request:
Would you please develop some art work for me? Of course, i can't pay you very much. But! It would really help me out and my project is so cool that it will give you exposure to people that may just be willing to pay you more than me. Oh yea, I'll be sure to be dilligent about promoting you at least as much as I'm promoting my own spiffy project (for which I need your help). So, will you spend some of your time to help me?
Jibe!
You might try Craigslist, especially if there is one in your area. I see all kinds of interesting jobs on there. Just today, I saw an ad for oil-wrestling girls for a trailer-trash themed party.
There's more serious stuff there too.
If you pay the artists the normal rates, you should have full rights over the work they produce for you. AFAIKv there's no source in art, just 'the work'.
___
internet, productivity blog
I'm not sure it'll help too much, but you might consider this: instead of just posting ads at local schools, find out if the schools have Placement offices, and go talk to whoever works there. A lot of colleges have some sort of office dedicated to helping students find internships, after-school and summer work, and find a real job after graduating. You may be able to get someone to do some of the leg-work in finding employees that way.
The problem is that Slashdot-frequenting code-heads believe in open source--which is a very new idea. Visual artists and musicians do not believe in open source. Visual artists and musicians are trained, and taught by experience, that making art and music for free is very bad business. This is because it's extraordinarily difficult for visual artists and musicians to make money from their hard-won talents in any event. They want to make dollars from their art, not from the day job delivering pizza that they have to take in order to finance their art and music hobby. That being understood, there are two ways that artists and musicians create work for distribution: 1) Royalties and 2) Work for hire. With royalties, the artist/musician retains ownership of the work and has the right to collect royalties on sales. With work-for-hire, you draw up a contract that says that you are paying the artist/musician for the work outright. You will own the work from that point forward. The artist agrees to take the money up front and what they create is no longer their property and they forfeit any right to collect any more money from it. So you need to find young, un-established artists that are willing to do the job for a reasonably small sum, and draw up a good work-for-hire contract. You can find examples of these contracts in several books on music business which you can find at the local library or on Amazon.
Check out worth1000.com
This type of thing has been done there before, for other types of projects that can't pay, can't pay much, or can pay oodles.