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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."
No need to wait. The article doesn't mention this, but 99designs is already saturated by Indians and Chinese who will happily undercut you. It's just a nice name for more outsourcing.
This happened about a decade ago in my field (translation) with sites like proz.com and later translatorscafe.com - there are other sites doing the same thing, but these are the two largest. It's a bidding race to the bottom with India and China.
And those of us who live in the US and Europe have been complaining about it ever since.
But then you get to a point where you realize that you don't want that kind of client anyway. And there are still many clients out there willing to pay the rate you want/deserve.
Look at it from the other direction. I have a very skilled friend that's having a hard time making money off the graphical design business because he hasn't made a name for himself yet. He uses that site to collect money to pay bills as his contributions are just as likely to get picked as someone with a big name because the exposure is similar for all 'contestants'.
It's worth noting that in many other industries where the criteria for determining the product quality is very subjective, bids will often take the form of nearly complete projects.
That's known as "working on spec." I used to work for a very prominent, very expensive packaging design firm in San Francisco, and our firm never, ever, ever did any work on spec. We showed up at a client meeting with nothing for them but a few vague ideas about the power of their brand, their customer base, and their market. No suggestions about color, about package shapes, nothing. You hired us based on the strength of our presentation and our past work and that was all.
Did our competitors ever try to undercut us by showing up with finished package designs before they had even landed the contract? Yes they did, especially as the market tightened. The real old timers found that way of doing business to be completely contemptible, and they attributed it to the young kids entering the field who had no respect for professionalism, etc. etc. But such is life -- times and practices change.
At the same time, many companies respected our track record and the strength of our creative staff enough that they would hire us, without seeing any specific designs, despite the fact that our rates were among the highest in the business. And, frankly, those were the jobs we wanted -- not because they were suckers, but because their jobs gave us the opportunity to continue to build a portfolio of respectable, quality work. There was no point in taking little piecemeal jobs that would pad out our portfolio with junk that looked like the same boring, unimaginative stuff everybody else was doing. We might as well have closed up shop. That would be no way to run a business -- and this 99designs.com, while it didn't exist back then, is evidence of that.
As in almost any field, there's a big difference between hackwork and high-end, professional work. People who want the latter will pay for the latter. In the case of graphic design, they're usually willing to pay for it because they recognize that graphic design is merely a tool to get them what they really want, which is a successful business, and a successful business is something worth investing in.
Breakfast served all day!
In an unregulated environment, the free market is only a transitory stage on the way to a marketplace dictated by trusts and cartels.
Foolish people don't realize that a market must be regulated to remain free. If the market is totally free, the most dominant and predatory businesses will destroy the smaller ones and then use their uncontested market power to create an "unfree" market that minimizes competition and decreases the cost of production (like wages). Late nineteenth century/early twentieth century history provides many examples of this (look at the railroads!).
So, when you compare the free market to gravity or evolution, you are just being silly.
I do agree that this is a free market situation, though. It looks like a certain category of designers is way overpricing themselves. This appears analogous to what happens to movie script writers--they're so eager to get creative acknowledgement that they virtually give their work away to Hollywood sharks.
There are competitive alternatives to this model. Quality designers could form cooperatives and market themselves online, for example.
Let me preface this by saying that I know it's probably going to sound fruity among the Slashdot populace which thinks that it needs to be quantifiable to be worthwhile.
I have two points to make. The first is one of what Werner Herzog calls the "Inadequate Imagery" of our time. To quote Herzog on Herzog, "I have often spoken of what I call the inadequate imagery of today's civilization. I have the impression that the images that surround us today are worn out; they are abused and useless and exhausted. They are limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution."
You can find the quote further elaborated here.
Businesspeople think in numbers, sales figures and short-term profits; not in visual aestheticism and subtlety. Presented with many, many options for promotional materials, they will usually choose what is safely cliche and what they think is "good enough". The point I'm trying to make with this is that crowdsourcing does not find the best (and not the best for the business, either).
This brings me nicely to my second point, which can also be summed nicely in a quote (which I'm paraphrasing because I cannot find the source at the moment): "Advertising is a unique business in that your wealthiest client can demand your worst product while your poorest client must humbly accept your best."
You are the poorest judge of yourself because you can only perceive yourself as you always have. A business is the same way: you can say that your business is about this and about that, but your customers' perception of you is your only true face. Crowdsourcing typically involves a business micromanaging every detail of a project in which they have no expertise ("we want a bold logo with a strong corporate message about blah blah blah, and it has to have these colours and these shapes and these words and blah blah blah").
A good designer and advertiser will develop an actual, face-to-face relationship with the business, be able to perceive it with fresh eyes and use their expertise to design the best possible outcome for the long term.
I recently sponsored my first two 99Designs contests, and it was (for the most part) a throughly pleasant experience. I paid $250 (plus fees) for a great logo. My local designer would have charged me $750. Oh, his absurd logo price schedule: $400 for non-profits, $750 for normal companies, and $1500 for big fish. Yea, you read me right. Nothing to do with effort. Based on ability to pay - charge what the traffic will bear. Is that a better system than 99design?
(The one negative was excessive nannying by 99Design staff and the "sour grapes" reaction by some contestants when I permitted a design to make use of a tracing of a photograph. The designer disclosed that to me, I gave him permission, and it turned out to be the winning design. Unfortunately, 99Design suspended the contestant for 7 days. Thank you very much, but let ME manage my legal risk. But they did pay him the prize money. Now, had somebody pointed-out the tracing before the contest was over, or at least before the winner was chosen, it would have been USEFUL to me. Instead, they waited till it was all over - and so it was just obstructive. In fact, I will probably have the traced part of the logo re-done, using the original tracing only as inspiration. I love the DESIGN CONCEPT and it is a starting point. I would have never come up with that logo design myself, and the tracing is just one element that can certainly be re-drawn from scratch. Contestants and 99Design staff DO NOT KNOW whether the logo will be used commercially as-is, and shouldn't make assumptions.)
Yes, there are poor-quality Chinese and Indian (gotta pick on SOMEBODY) entries. And they were obviously low-quality I eliminated them early on. I never eliminated a DESIGNER (something you CAN do), and in fact one of designers of the early low-quality entries listened to feedback well enough to ultimately come very close to winning. BTW, the Chinese designers tend to have horrible typefaces, so they get eliminated on that if you have any taste at all. Yes, some of the designers have poor or no English skills, so that feedback is nearly impossible. But they still see other's designs and your "star ratings" of designs (unless you run a "blind" contest) and so they still can see the direction you are going. Myself, I prefer to work with the designers that have excellent English skills making feedback effective. There's no lack of designers with excellent English skills.
It's important to provide feedback. I gave plenty, and the designers appreciated it.
Sometimes you get a great result through feedback and iteration. Sometimes a great design just drops out of the sky. The winner of my logo contest worked his ass of making change after change at my request. My second choice just swooped-in with a beautiful, simple design that required just a single iteration - to change the colors in the company name. I told him "don't change a thing - it is perfect". (The second choice was really a much better logo - it just wasn't the image I wanted to project. Great for a Fortune-500 bank or investment house. Not playful enough for an iPhone software development company.) The second-choice probably didn't take the designer much time. Three simple shapes that overlap to form the logo. I think he just got an inspiration that took him a half-hour to draw. Both approaches are valid, and 99Designs allows you to choose.
In fairness to contestants, once I had leading choices, I stopped making requests of other contestants. No need to run the ragged for nothing. I imagine most contest holders (or at least experienced ones) are pretty fair to contestants this way.
Next time, I will try running a "preliminary design" contest, and a second one (or contract with the winner) for a finished design. Tell the contestants right-off, I'm not looking for a finished design, but design concepts. I think it's useful to be a bit creative with the process. This is the way it often works with a single designer, anyway. You get rough sketches, color palettes, etc. first, then final artwork later. 99De