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Why Designers Hate Crowdsourcing
An anonymous reader writes "Since Wired's Jeff Howe coined the term in 2006, 'crowdsourcing' has been a buzzword in the tech industry, and a business model on the rise. 99designs.com is a site that hosts design contests for small businesses requiring relatively smaller design projects. Anyone can submit their near finished pieces of work to the contests, but only one winner gets paid. Forbes covers just why established graphic designers are so angry at this business model's catching on."
This is no different than Expedia disrupting the travel agent industry, iStockPhoto allowing designers to buy photos shot by amateurs for $1, or eTrade allowing people to do their own stock trading for $9 a piece.
The only people that complain about disruptive innovation are those directly affected by it. Gone are the days when you can charge $5000 for 3 logo concepts when some college student is happy to spend 2 hours cranking out a concept in his spare time for the chance at winning $269 - the price quoted on the 99designs logo design page.
Piecework is basically bullshit. It's effectively hiring 10 people to do a job and then only paying one of them (at most). It's basically using the fact that they're "Contests" to stiff 99% of the people in the business.
On the other hand, the times are changing and you have to either adapt of die. You can't really rage against the fact that globalization increases competition.
No, it's more like this.
Imagine your Boss came to you and said "We're having 10 programmers make the same program, but we'll only pay one of you". That means that 9 of them end up working for free. That's why they hate that business model, no serious graphics designer can make a living out of such contests.
They hate it for the same reason that the music industry hates the Internet, they lose control of the marketplace and are unable to charge a premium for intangibles. Basically, the established design professionals are used to being able to charge more than the value they add to the product because it was too hard to find good alternatives. I am not saying that experienced, quality design professionals do not add significant value over most of what you can get from crowd sourcing sites. It's just that they want to charge more for that value than what it is worth in today's marketplace. When it was hard to find people who had a natural talent for design for a particular product or market segment, it was worth paying more for people who were proven at creating good designs for many different areas and additionally had experience in what types of design seem good in development, but turn out to be bad ideas in production. Now that it is easier to find people who are inexperienced, but have a natural talent, that experience is less valuable.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Sounds to me like there's a supply and demand problem for these established designers... namely there's too much supply for the available demand.
I understand their position: for someone outside of the design industry, it can be difficult to know who to go to with a project. So large, established designers get good business, just because they have enough of a reputation to appeal to the more conservative business types. But the prices they're charging are well above the market optimum, and they thrive off of imperfect knowledge in their client base. An organization like 99designs.com gives small, unknown, but potentially talented players access to the client base that has typically been reserved for the big guys. This drives the actual price of services (when amortized over all the work that doesn't get paid for) down to the actual economic optimum.
In other words, it's an industry bitching about the internet killing their business model. Yawn.
I actually think dramatically devaluing the programming process through a system like this would go a long way toward deflating the out of control arrogance in the nerd population.
I, for one, can't wait.
Designers, like everyone else in service industries, are competing against everyone in the market. There's no more hiding. You have to demonstrate value. It's not easy to show non-designers what the value of good design is, but good designers are effective communicators; if you can't communicate your value to clients, you shouldn't expect them to pay the rates many designers are used to charging. On the flip side, I'm reminded of this reminder of the value a truly skilled, experienced designer can deliver.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
It's the same in any industry...once a group of people figure out how to make an income they then put bureaucratic barriers (e.g. legal, regulatory, educational, or certification requirements) in place. They then develop their own lexicon which future puts an informal educational barrier in place and they treat anyone who doesn't speak their cant as an outsider. It's a natural evolution where they try to protect their income by making it harder for the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th person through the door to accomplish what they have. This of course struggles against technology and innovation which is making it easier and eventually innovation overcomes the barriers but in the mean time the dinosaurs fight ferociously to live in the manner they have become accustomed to. See RIAA, MPAA, Software Patents, all certified careers, etc. etc. etc.
You put a job up, you pick the "winner", and it gets fulfilled.
Then you see the same design has been shopped around to every other site, including your direct competitors.
Then you see that this "design in a box" approach actually handily ignored many of your stated requirements in your original request.
All this to save a few bucks on design by farming it out to people who do this for literally a few bucks a job. You get what you pay for: a $50 design that looks cookie cutter (because it is), and is designed by "e-lancers" from India and China who didn't understand all of your requirements and in most cases, didn't have time to care, because they'll only see $10 of it.
Frankly, I can see why they're angry. This business model reduces their profession to amateur hour - and it can only hurt it in the long run.
I've worked in both the public and private sector. There is a reputable way to select somebody for a contract in a competitive setting. It's called a request for a quote, or RFQ (or request for a proposal, RFP). A general call goes out to businesses and people in the required industry. Proposals are collected, with projected timelines, pricings, and samples. Then, a decision is made, and the winner gets the contract. The losers go on to bid on other contracts.
The point, though, is that the time spent producing the final product is spent only by the winner. Everybody else moves on.
Now, that's the right way to do it. What's described in the article is the wrong way to do it. Imagine, for a moment, that you're a web site designer (I know the article is about graphic designers, but bear with me here). How would you feel if instead of preparing a proposal for a part of a website, you had to prepare the entire finished product - and then, after those hours of work (that could have been spent on working for a paying client, or in finding a paying client), you find out that somebody else got the contract, and therefore you get nothing?
Somehow, I think you'd be pretty pissed off too.
Now, this may be fine if you're just starting out, but it's not going to sit well once you've got a few years of experience under your belt. The really good people are going to get sick of it and do one of two things - they'll either leave that model and just work for the people who will treat them like professionals, or they'll leave the field itself.
Will amateur hour be cheaper than dealing with professionals? Absolutely. But, in the long run, it will drive the real talent out, and that will just make the field poorer.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
If this continues, you will not see a single person their who has a degree above a high school diploma.
if higher education in design does not provide a strong enough competitive advantage in terms of output quality, than such education is a waste of resources and should die off. this isn't medicine or engineering where fuckups kill people. the worse that happens is a design does not win, or a company chooses a crap design and has an ugly logo or website until they figure out that it sucks and change it.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Except there is no boss, this is freelance contract work. This website is for turning a hobby into a chance to get paid, not steady employment. Bored? Make a logo, post it. Profit, or don't, it's still more money than you'd have gotten paid playing video games all day.
Any profitable business is based on some barrier for entry for competitors. When the barrier gets lower, the profitability inevitably goes down to zero as a result of unhindered competition. This is called free market.
Being angry about this is like being angry at gravity or evolution.
Which means that everyone else that submits work has essentially done so for free. No one would want to work like that, and such crowdsourcing is in no way a viable path for real, fulltime employment. Besides, I'd be just as worried as a client. I post vague specifications and hope for the best? That's asinine. Good design work requires that the artist and the client work back and forth, improving and changing the product little by little until both are satisfied. You don't get that here. What you get with crowdsourcing is mostly mediocrity. Why invest tons of effort into something that you very likely will not get paid for?
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
You joke, but most businesses rely on their ability to project sober professionalism and seriousness. People who don't understand that Comic Sans (I know, I just font-Godwinned myself here) deteriorates that image of professionalism rather than merely communicating "informal" or "fun" (often when neither is even appropriate in the first place) shouldn't be designing anything that represents their company. And if they're in charge of paying someone else to design it, they should take advantage of that designer's skillset.
I don't tell my auto mechanic how to do his job, because I don't know how to replace wheel bearings, nor do I want to.
whatever.
you say that as if graphic designers aren't just english majors with pirated photoshop and illustrator.
Then most professionals would laugh in your face at such a concept and walk away. Those who want to pay peanuts, end up hiring monkeys. If the business arrangement doesn't suit you, don't enter it. That person would *never* have been your customer anyway because the way they want to scrimp and save and "only pay one person" means they were always looking for a cheap way out - and any *decent* designer wouldn't be satisfied with what they were offering. The designers haven't *lost* any business, they just aren't getting any from a new "auction-style" job market that's cropped up. That's up to them, but it's hardly a jobs nightmare. At any point in history, in any profession, the same thing could have (and has) happened.
They're angry because they're established. Expensive suits. Exquisitely designed suites to work in.
It hurts when your whole business model is built on puff and people start figuring it out.
Graphic designers' business model is not built on puff. Of course, it is in the best interests of business owners who buy the services of graphic designers to lie and claim it is all puff, but that's just a bargaining tactic. In fact, I would have to say that the profession of CEO is built on puff far more than that of graphic designer. Why not crowdsource business decisions? That would certainly cut the outrageous salaries of these well connected upper class twits. CEOs get paid regardless of performance, yet supposedly we offer CEOs such unfairly high compensation because we need to attract the best performers. But these 'best performers' will not accept a contract that ties pay to performance! And we need these best performers, so we can't measure their performance or they won't work for us. But we already know they must be the best, because look how much compensation they are asking for. Or something. Crowdsource those rich assholes, not struggling artists.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The problem that 99designs solves is that most clients don't need a $20,000 design and don't have $20,000 to spend.
Years ago I worked for a company that made point of sale systems. They had a logo that looked like a monogram on someone's shirt. It was drawn by a marketing VP who had no design experience, in the early days of the company. Eventually it became an embarrassment and they hired a consultant who made a new logo, new letterhead, etc., for $80,000.
But the thing is that they only sold to industry and didn't need that degree of expertise. Something from 99designs would have been good enough, and if it happened to look exactly like the logo some real estate management startup in Boise, Idaho was using, too, so what. Since then I've worked for a bunch of startups and the logo and website design has always been a problem. Usually it gets done by somebody's kid or somebody's friend, because startups don't want to spend thousands of dollars on a logo unless they're selling a consumer product.
Let's apply the same thing to every highly paid job. We're going to let thousands of doctors offer their diagnosis, but only one of them will get paid. Eventually we can get the cost of everything to almost zero!
Freelance writers have long complained of similar practices amongst "content mills" such as Demand Studios (the guys behind all those "how to" webpages). The mill pays $3/story, $15/video. For a working writer or videographer, it's the kind of revenue that puts the "chump" into "chump change." But -- and here's the catch -- thousands and thousands of people will work for this! Many full-time writers sneer at them as mere wannabes who are pissing into the community pool, but their work is (apparently) good enough for The Client, and these folks are happy to be making some beer money "writing professionally." The thing is, there are so many writers -- and designers, too, apparently -- and the bar for entry into the profession is so low, and the, well, "romance/coolness" of being a paid (however niggardly) creative artiste is so great, that the Content Mills have such low overhead they are making money hand-over-fist.
Of course, if you're really good at what you do, you get to name your price and you do well. But if you're in the bottom 90 percent of a profession whose products -- such as words and designs -- aren't constrained by artificial geographical boundaries and location (thanks to this new-fangled Internet thingy) then, brother, you are scrapping and scrambling.
If the design isn't picked, the designer still owns all rights to it and can submit it again. It's also part of his or her portfolio. "Real" designers work the same way, often developing several candidates for consideration or being pitted against other designers.
99% of everything is crap. That'll be true for crowdsourcing and traditional models.
Everyone wants a crowdsourced model when they're buying, and no one wants it when they're selling. Do you think the grocery store wants you to pick the nicest looking apples from the pile? Of course not. Do you? Of course you do.
Look, if I'm a business and I can get a good design at a cheap price I'll do it. If it's cheap enough, I can, as a business, take a chance -- what am I out if it doesn't go anywhere?
If "no one would want to work like that" then the crowd would dwindle, the site would fold and business would return to usual. Just because you don't see value in the model doesn't mean that applies to everybody. Sounds like you are whiny graphic designer who has his/her knickers in a twist because you now have to compete against a larger pool. The expanded pool may be mediocre but even a blind sow finds an acorn occasionally. If you do consistently excellent work, and consistently meet client needs, you can charge for it. If you are a hack then the pressure will expose you as such.
Graphic designers are like everybody else, they want to be "special". But like everybody else almost all of them aren't special. This is not Lake Wobegon and all the children are not above average.
Imagine your Boss came to you and said "We're having 10 programmers make the same program, but we'll only pay one of you". That means that 9 of them end up working for free. That's why they hate that business model, no serious graphics designer can make a living out of such contests.
And the decision of who to pay will be made by someone with no expertise in evaluating user interface design, usability, scalability, security, or correctness.
As much as I don't want to bestow special powers to designers, I have met good designers that seem to have a gift. Through training, experience, and natural talent, they can design visuals that direct the eye to the right place, evoke the right emotions, and have lasting impact. Most people cannot consciously distinguish between visuals that have those properties and those that do not, so when the client simply chooses from a large pool of designs there is no telling if the graphic is actually any good.
They say most of the designs submitted take no more time from a designer than it would take for them to bid on a serious project. If they're making bids for free anyway, there's really not much difference to them.
the difference is that in the traditional model, you need have some sort of infrastructure built up around you to be successful. you need a portfolio, a suit, a nice haircut, professional references, possibly a job history.
traditional designers object. why? they now have to compete against people that normally would be excluded for reasons other than their skill set.
The trouble is apply this to every industry and all of a sudden it's not overcharging fat cats that add no value that are affect: Suddenly there is no way to make a decent living. The only industries that survive are the ones that require qualifications.
In other words I agree that charging $5000 for 3 logo concepts isn't necessarily reasonable, but I don't want to see only amateurs compete for a single prize pool of $269 either. Effectively most people are working for free. That's not reasonable either. Surely there's a middle ground?
Nope. Welcome to globalization! Billions of third world people just waiting to do what you do for 1/10th the price. Expect your living standard to trend towards theirs, because if it's one thing this planet has, it's a huge excess of available labor.
Advice: on VPS providers
Ooh! I like the way you're thinking! Now, just make me up 6 or 7 full-color variations on this theme - suitable for envelopes, brochures, and billboards - and if I like any, I'll buy one.
Dark Reflection
If the design isn't picked, the designer still owns all rights to it and can submit it again.
Um, you might want to read the "contract" very carefully. Most such contests have wording hidden out in the fine print to the effect that all submissions become the property of the company running the contest. So if 1000 people submit entries, the company pays for one of them, but legally owns the other 999. Read the tiny language that comes with most such contests, and see if you can spot where it says this. They can be clever at obfuscating the wording, but with careful reading you can usually spot it.
I've seen a couple of writing contests run by publishers that play the same trick. The top-rated 2 or 3 stories get a reward, but the publisher publishes an entire book of the top N stories. If the authors of the other stories complain, the publisher just quotes the above passage from the contest rules, and refuses to pay anything to the other "losing" authors.
(This is all in the USA; other countries may outlaw such misleading trickery. But probably not many countries do. Anyone here have any data about this?)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
There are various "coders for hire" sites and such like that. The sites do well, but they are not truly disruptive to the software industry. This is because few professional programmers will put the time and effort into going there because the rates are terrible. And few serious companies use it because they can't get quality for the prices they are offering. But bored students, the unemployed, a few freelancers, and inhabitants of undeveloped nations will look for work there.
The question is: what percentage of the demand for this product can be met by that market segment?
It may turn out that the average corporation can't tell a good design from a bad one. If so, then graphic designers will start to go out of business until either the corporations realize that their designs aren't working, or until graphic designers realize that design quality doesn't actually matter. I suspect reality lies somewhere in between: cruddy designs are good enough for a lot of the market. Only the best designers will survive to get the remaining high-end contracts.
If these kids genuinely aren't as good then they're not devaluing anything, are they? If it's not worth as much then it doesn't matter that they compete with each other and get paid less. If what you do is actually worth something then you'll get money for it. If you don't get money for it it's worthless. Or it's fine art.
it's under construction
Monopolies are always bad and competition is always good. Unless it's labour we're talking about. Then competition is just a bunch of scabs and monopoly is the loving embrace of the union organizer.
The rich have been taking from the poor for decades now, real income for the bottom 80% of America has been stagnant since the sixties. In the same period, the top 1% has gone from earning 8-9% of the GDP to earning 20% or more. I am advocating that the poor look after their own interests and stop letting the rich take from them.
That is why we have government, to protect the weak from the tyranny of the strong.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Could be, I have no favorites between the CEO and the web designer, it's indifferent to me how they split the cash among themselves.
The important point is that in most corporations savings are distributed among several items. Part goes to executive bonuses, some of it goes to dividends, and the rest is used to lower prices.
Lower prices mean increased market share and more sales, which means more profit, and more profit means more dividends and fatter bonuses for executives, so it's natural that companies will always try to lower their prices with whatever savings they get.
> "Real" designers work the same way, often developing several candidates for consideration or being pitted against other designers.
Uh, poor designers work the same way. "Oh, I get a portfolio item, THANK YOU" is not a business model.
The real story is that bad-to-average design is no longer scarce. The tools are ubiquitous, and many people play with them. So you're going to see a tiered economy: the wannabes doing spec work for minimum wage on places like istockphoto.com and the golden glorious few doing high touch client-focused work for $200 an hour. Similar to whats happening in photography and journalism, and for much the same reasons.
That's not a better analogy. It's actually quite terrible. Nothing is taken from the designers that they did not agree to and readily give. The "bitten apple" analogy is completely skewed, otherwise nobody would choose the designers that were rejected once. Their career would be over the second they were no longer in 1st place.
I compare the risk of designers being crowdsourced as similar to the risk of engineering jobs being outsourced. It was only a matter of time before this would start to happen. In the same way that news reporters may be getting replaced by Twitter, the Phone book may be getting replaced with Facebook, and CDs were replaced with MP3s. You just gotta take the change and live with it, all professions will be effected as technology, the internet, and massive scale multi-user interactions become more pervasive and extensive.
If you do consistently excellent work, and consistently meet client needs, you can charge for it. If you are a hack then the pressure will expose you as such.
The thing is, with crowdsourcing and more competition... the clients of designers who currently "meet clients needs" and do excellent work may try the service and soon find, while their designer of choice WAS meeting their needs, and they were very happy before,
They find that people competing in a contest more than just meet their needs and what they asked for they exceed their expectations. IOW, they could get superior results from the contest medium, even if they were exuberant and perfectly happy with a paid designer before.
Or it was less expensive to get the same great result. They didn't have to pay someone who's built a business on providing the service to people.
Suddenly the skilled professional designers who have had years of professional training and huge portfolios great work may find themselves on a level playing field with random people who hardly know about anything at all and just have a natural talent.
I can see why pro designers wouldn't like this. They have a lot to fear really. The profession "graphics designer" could cease to exist, or the expectations of pay could drop, for most jobs, where the crowdsourcing alternative exceeds or adequately replaces them.
Graphics artists might have to go back to school or switch fields, if they went into the job for profits, or were used to the fact the explosion of the world wide web and e-commerce made the design profession so important and lucrative....
Only to the extent a job really does require special ability, special skills, or peculiarly uncommon knowledge to perform, will they have any sort of robust protection against crowdsourcing, outsourcing, etc.
Crowdsourcing only works for abilities the masses have and that the masses are willing to share/compete for an award using, rather than receiving payment.
99designs should work just fine and have great results, even if every professional designer in the world vows to never compete or submit any design on it.
Thinking on this further, I agree that last one is the most accurate. The apples that don't get picked are still as salable as they ever were, no one is getting something for free. To beat this analogy into a greasy horse shaped patch on the ground, apples were previously only sold in apple boutiques where you bought apples from elite growers and if you wanted different apples, you had to drive to a different boutique. Now the apples are sold in a farmers' market where anyone can set up a stall, even crabapples. You can peruse many different kinds of apples and everyone is putting in a real effort shining themselves up and barking at you about how tasty they are. Naturally, the apples liked being sold in boutiques because it made them feel special, not like some basket weaver selling his wares on the corner.
In my opinion if the apples want a better deal, the apples should form an apple cooperative of their own, enforce some reasonable standards of quality and service, perform some training, marketing and networking services and basically add value and (importantly) distribute that value equitably among the apples, cutting out the middle man apple sellers entirely.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
but only one winner gets paid
Of course graphic designers are going to get angry.
I read it as "only one winner gets laid" which made me think of the following analogy: It's like that girl who goes around accepting drinks from all the guys at the bar, but only goes home with one of them. Sadly, that's still a popular business model.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
My design firm charges by the hour. If you want a logo that we did in an hour, we can do that, in an hour. The prices is one times our hourly rate. It is not going to be the best logo, but it will only take us one hour.
If you want to have two planning conference calls, a focus group, then six rounds of comps and five final versions for various mediums, a favicon, a 125x125 banner and more, then it cost as much as time as it takes.
If clients do not like this, then can negotiate the world of crowd-sourceing, getting a cousin to do it and mocking it up themselves.
The problem with all that is that if you want a change later on, you are on your own, If you need a two color version for a silk screen, you might be SOL. If your cheap logo is not 100% vector, good luck putting it on a billboard or wrapping a vehicle.
Just as anyone can work on their own plumbing or get some cheap person to do it, there will always be a market for creative professionals who know what they are doing.
If you are losing work to the design sites, you don't want those clients anyways. Or you can let them get their logo from a contest, then design their business cards, website, make money brokering their ads/print/etc/, and create a long term relationship. That could happen as well.
They hate it for the same reason that the music industry hates the Internet, they lose control of the marketplace and are unable to charge a premium for intangibles.
It's not "a premium for intangibles." It's the opportunity to get get paid for your time vs the expectation that you'll work for free unless your work is utilized.
What do you do? You an IT worker like most of the site? Let's say you troubleshoot systems -- how about we say that you don't get anything old fashioned like a salary or an hourly wage anymore: instead, you'll compete with others to see who can find/fix the problem first. The person who does that gets paid a flat rate. Everyone else gets nothing. Or, let's say you write code. You and one hundred other coders provide to spec. First one gets something, everyone else doesn't. No messy employee-employer relationship -- that stuff is for communists and music industry racketeers, right? Just pure market transactions. Beautiful, right? Certainly nothing you could have any complaint against -- in fact, if you really believe in your comment, truly and deeply, back it up: suggest that arrangement to your employer tomorrow.
After all, you wouldn't want to be like a music industry dinosaur, and frankly, if you're drawing either a salary or hourly wage off of it, you're exactly as much like the music industry as a graphic designer.
Tweet, tweet.
The problem with your argument is many clients (new / small businesses) don't know the value of working WITH a designer. This is kinda like when a person walks into Wal-Mart to buy a socket set. It looks shiny in their toolbox, and they don't know any better until it strips out / twists / breaks when they need to put some real pressure on it.
Wal-Mart has driven countless small local businesses into bankruptcy while making a mint selling this crap.
Personally, I think this means that as design becomes just another commodity you are going to see serious downward pressure on the fees that all but the largest firms can command (think of Dell, HP, etc as the commodity side of that equation and Apple (ironically) as the high end). After all, I read an article about companies outsourcing design to India (I'm looking for the article - I'll post later).
I work for a small non-profit and charity and we've just recently put together a little t-shirt contest to build our community and get people involved. In short order, we got two separate emails from designers complaining about how our contest "cheapens" professional design.
Anyway, we had a little fun sending a reply back. I've posted it here: http://www.cogno.ca/b/