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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.
funny, I would have thought it would have had more to do with doing a entire project (not just the proposal) and getting squat for it?.
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
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
But...the unwashed masses might PICK THE WRONG FONT...the horror...the horror...
After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a scab. A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles. When a scab comes down the street, men turn their backs and Angels weep in Heaven, and the Devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out....
Attributed to Jack London, but there's not really any proof he wrote it.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
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.
While clients may or may not be getting "Walmart-quality" designs, they're certainly paying Walmart prices. Logo payouts can run as low as $211, while a webpage design package starts at just $499--rates considered absurdly low by some in the business.
Hate to be the one tell you artists this, but that's hardly low. Lots of people simply google for attractive website templates and pay $50 them, or some small amount to get them exclusively.
For those who want more custom work, places like vworker, freelancer, etc. have an abundance of people who'll do graphic design work for peanuts. True, it may not be as fantabulous as something costing thousands, but you can get a logo design for $20 and for 80% of the people in the marketplace, it's good enough to have your company's name in some sort of distinctive design.
The world is lousy with art students and third world people with cracked copies of Photoshop. Graybeards from the 80s are annoyed that this work is no longer geographically bound and the Internet has made cheap labor abundant. Not everything about the Internet is good for every person.
Advice: on VPS providers
I've run a few projects through crowdspring. I try to be really responsive with submissions, I've seen designs go from "meh" to "completely fantastic" with only a few revisions.
Looking at my history, the people who I seem to pick seem to win a decent percentage of the time.
For larger projects, or projects where the stakes are simply larger, I'd want to build a relationship with a designer, or design house, rather than go through something like this.
paul reinheimer
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
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.
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
Threadless has been very successful crowd sourcing designs for shirts, wall clings, etc. I have seen Hanes and other big names try and get on the 'clever/funny t-shirt' money train, but their stuff is horrid. I don't think any design 'team' could ever do better job with this type of thing than one person with some decent software, a Wacom tablet, and a really great idea. What's more, Threadless pays a few hundred bucks the most highly voted designs.
Nude No More!
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
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!
You are severely underestimating the time value of money. While the results may be cheaper than hiring a professional, you have absolutely 0 guarantee you will see something presentable in your desired timeframe. The longer you wait the more opportunities your competitors have to catch up and eventually surpass you, not to mention you may have to idle some of your resources while you wait for a critical component.
While competitions like these may turn a lot of heads because they are so unconventional, in reality the noise generated is a lot more than the actual impact.
Monstar L
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.
No serious graphic designer can make a living out of such contests, so no serious graphic designer will enter such contest. Therefore any work you get through such a contest will not be that of a serious graphic designer. If you need serious graphic design work, you will not use such a contest. Therefore, these contests can't be taking work away from serious graphic designers.
I heard a story on NPR about these guys last weekend or the one before. 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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
My first job out of college many years ago was as a tech writer. I got 'synergized' into also being responsible for producing marketing materials (because I had a Mac, and had figured out how to use Adobe Illustrator and Quark and etc.). It seemed potentially fun at first. I read a few books on graphic design, and pestered a couple of buddies of mine where were employed as actual designers for tips and critiques of my first efforts, which they thought pretty impressive.
The people at work, however, hated it. I learned that at my company, no one else was a tech writer, but EVERYONE was a budding artist, whose many opinions on aesthetics HAD to be listened to. I took to doing three comps for any project, one of which was always the butt-ugliest, most garish, negative-space-ignoring piece of crap I could muster. Guess which one the President and Director of Marketing -always- picked? Everyone thought I was a genius.
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.
That's exactly what Shirt.Woot does on the weekends - anyone with a (free) Woot account can submit a design, anyone who's bought something from Woot before can say "I'd buy that!". The top three are materialized into actual shirts. Some of the people who submit designs are professional graphical artists, but quite a few people are just interested amateurs.
And frequently, they're far better than anything I've ever seen on any other t-shirt site (and it's only $10, which is pretty good for a designer shirt). I mean, just look at this shirt! It's amazing to think that he made that with only something like five or six colors, too (which is another one of the requirements, due to the limitations of cheap silkscreening).
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.
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'.
$6/hr is a great wage if you have a 3rd-world cost-of-living. Wage earners in the USA are getting fucked career by career. I sense the return of unions, or something like them, on the horizon. When the downsides[1] of dog-eat-dog exceed the upsides[2] for average people, you will see change.
[1] Career turmoil and stress
[2] $4 lawn-chairs
Every company that harbors a union and has non-union competition either ends up successfully unionizing the competition, or in bankruptcy. The result is invariable, because labor costs are ultimately, the one cost that is unique to a given company. All other costs can be duplicated / reduced to the lowest common denominator. So if your labor costs more than your competition, then the competition slowly drives you out of business. Unions are good for protecting workers from their own greedy bosses. There is nothing in a free market economy that can protect workers from cheaper competitors*.
On a side note, if the US government wants to fix the unemployment problem, there is a quick way to decrease unemployment: Increase overtime to 2x normal pay for any hours over 8/40, and make all employees including professional / salaried employees eligible for overtime, and protect them under labor laws. This will eliminate the incentive for companies to load up salaried employees with 60+ hour work weeks, and they will have to start massive hiring to back fill the work that needs to be done. Profits will plummet, the stock market will drop, and wages will fall, but employment will return to 95+%, but what is more important? A bunch of investors getting their 8% ROI, or Joe Sixpack actually being able to get his job back at 70% of his former pay now that the company, that layed him off and assigned his 40 hours of work / week to his overworked / salaried co-worker, is forced to hire him back rather than pay double time to get the same work done.
*Except possibly governments when they care enough to try. We have all seen how effective government is at that sort of thing...
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
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!
You're not a professional designer, are you? Lots of established designers will not get involved with speculative pitches because working for no money is just stupid. Yes, you can be pitted against other designers but your portfolio, and contact with the client to see if you get along, should be enough. It's normally only those designers who don't have a track record that are prepared to work for no money. When I was starting out I used a few speculative pitches to build my portfolio but now I wouldn't consider that.
Let a bunch of people make me suits and then decide whose cut I like the best...it will save me so much and I will look so good! Of course the tailors will never be lining up to do this because their work actually has material costs and takes a reasonable amount of time.
This only works because its not hard to crank out a mediocre website layout or a mediocre design or a mediocre how-to guide. If I am a non-working designer and I have a chance to spend a few minutes in photoshop designing some logo for your crappy company Cheapskate Inc., it doesn't cost me anything other than time to make a logo of a roller skate with pennies for wheels. The time can be viewed as practice/portfolio work if my design doesn't get picked. If you wanted me to animate a movie or design a full functioning web app to your specifications, this would not happen--it no longer feels like entering a photoshop contest but more like real work that I should be paid for. Even more so if I am now spending money to make clothing that only fits one specific person...its not useful as a portfolio piece, its not useful to anybody else, and I am sure I could find somebody who was at least willing to pay for materials in exchange for free labor.
People have mentioned sites like shirt.woot and threadless but I don't count these as crowds-for-hire style crowdsourcing. They are more like an art contest gone wild. There are no specific requirements other than people liking their work. They are trying to make art and sell it just like any other artist (although here your price turns into some small amount of money and a free t-shirt). If threadless instead operated on a system of "hey designers, please submit a cool Boeing tshirt", they would not have such inspired designs.
Bottles.
I got 99 designs but a bitc^h^h^h^h professional quality piece of work ain't one
Bottles.
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
Ha, here is the problem. Nobody cares if the design is done by a 'professional', or some 12 year old kid. If it looks good, fine, accept it. Nobody is not going to buy from you with your cheaply designed logo, nobody cares.
This is the problem, you are pretending that a professional logo designer is actually better than anyone else. This is not like programming at all. Who cares if the colors blend well, or the font is correct, or the spacing is wrong, or the proportions are incorrect. NOBODY CARES ABOUT THAT STUFF EXCEPT FOR DESIGNERS.
Please, excuse him. He's used to sticking potatoes with variously-shaped holes cut in them into abnormally large openings.
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
Yes, for much the same reason you will turn your back on toilet paper prices at $15/12 and pick up the cheaper $8/12 pack and wonder what's wrong with the first guy that he charged so much.
I was in that position where, for a while, my kind of job position was getting ridiculously overpaid, and the company offered us a little bonus pay to keep us on. Then the dot-com bubble burst, and that money went away. I am bringing this up to say I have been in a similar position so I'm not lecturing from the heights, if you will.
The one thing I agree with you is if someone is being paid way less than they should be. For example, $1/day building iPods, or whatever. But since determining the just price boils down to people's subjective judgments, you'll still end up with people complaining. This is why the marketplace is the least objectionable method to determine a fair price. It's not going to always reflect what you think is just, but it'll match more what other people think is just.
But there is a ray of hope: I did end up getting paid at least as much later because I am worth that much to the company. I make them more $$ than it costs to pay me $, so I do reasonably well. A $50/hour designer, if they can do really good work better than other designers, will continue to get $50/hour. It's just the mediocres who've been coasting on lack of competition who get screwed.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
> "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.
Welllll, what you say is sort of true, to an extent. You're viewing design work on an excessively etherial level, I think.
YES, it is true that a mid-level designer might have just as easily come up with the AT&T logo. But when AT&T contracts out a brand redesign, what it wants is probably not merely a logo. It wants a brand system that's going to include everything from business cards to stationery to the graphics on the sides of the trucks it rolls out to fix the phone lines. It probably wants one version of the logo for color printing and it needs an alternate system in one color for cases where color printing is not economical. It probably needs elements of the logo to scale to different sizes so that it can fit on different form factors and the type is still legible. It might need designs for for the boxes it ships out DSL modems in. It might need designs for uniforms. There might be considerations for global markets. All this happens before AT&T even talks about advertising materials, which will probably be someone else's responsibility, but all of it needs to be on deadline so it can be rolled out simultaneously. And all of it has different requirements -- four color process, spot color, silk screening, etc. -- and someone needs to go out to press checks to make sure everything looks OK, and so on.
That's why it costs $50,000.
Breakfast served all day!
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
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.
don't forget sense of entitlement.
I once had a graphics designer go completely ape at me when a buddy of mine asked how to put up a website, and I carefully explained to him how I could get a 'website' up and certainly work out the infrastructure side of things, but it would be a basic piece of HTML with no style or design etc. but yes I could show him how to get something up on the web. The graphics designer at the table immediately flipped his lid and started haranguing me on how thats not a website, its people like you ruining the industry, blah blah blah.
He also didn't understand the concept that without routing and switching guys like me (nevermind the server admins, which I also know a fair chunk of, enough to do most SMB/soho scale requirements) his beautiful designs would be seen by a total of 0 people, but nevermind. This is also the kind of moron who said loudly in 2001 that digital cameras would never catch on with 'real' photographers.
Needless to say he makes a lot less than us digital plumbers.
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
A system like this has already been in effect for years. RentACoder (now vworker) is a site where people post projects and then people bid on how cheaply they can do the work. I use to look at the site and people were bidding in the $teens for developing a CMS
No, it's different. With that site, people place their bids and you choose which one you want to work with. Only after you choose does the person break out their code editor and start programming. With the 99designs model, everybody does the work up-front and tweaks it along the way based on feedback. After getting sometimes thousands of designs for a few hundred dollar potential payout, the person holding the contest chooses and pays only one.
For RentACoder to be the same, all the programmers bidding would have to start and finish programming of a CMS, submitting their fully functional completed CMS as their bid. The person whose project it is would pay only one programmer.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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.
Maybe it is my inbuilt distaste for duhsigners, but that sounds very similar to The Emperor's New Clothes.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Guys, our porches and fancy holidays are in danger! Some hack company has figured out a cheaper way to supply the emperor with his new clothes!
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I just hope that they won't be as pathetic like the RIAA and sue people seeking yesterday's fees. No more middlemen! Internet has changed the world and business models need to adapt. If you are a super designer, you will still find high paying contracting work. If you are a talent, be it music, movies, whatever - you will still get paid (maybe little less than before, but say thanks!). If your'e not, go join the crowd.
If you can make your process require less fewer skills, you can pay less for the labour to enable it.
Hence robots welding cars. Hence McDonalds having a very clear procedure for EVERY task in their restaurants, very clearly laid out in the three-ring binder, as well as timers on their clamshell grill and pictures of hamburgers on their point of sale tills, and most importantly, factories that produce pre-prepared food items ready to shove in the grill or the fryer.
When mechanisation can magnify the efforts of a few skilled people so much, the labour market inevitably takes a nosedive.
As a race we profit immensely from our ingenuity, but these profits are concentrated in the upper strata of society while the lower strata benefit almost solely as a function of generating these profits.
I can't help but wonder whether graphic designers who had spent their entire lives in India or China would struggle with designing for American markets in the same way.
Short answer: nope.
Long answer: the American culture is well known throughout the world. Most IT guys / designers from the 3rd world have early-childhood exposure to American movies, American TV shows, American sitcoms, American fast-food, American cars, and American consumer goods. While of course the exposure rate may vary wildly, given the sheer amount of Indians (or Chinese, or Russians, or Brazilians, or Eastern Europeans, or Arabs - pick your favorite) you can bet there will be enough available 3rd world talent having a deep understanding of the American culture.
On a personal note, the first time I've arrived to the USA (in 2000, NYC) I was quite surprised how familiar everything looked to me. I'm from Romania and I had no problems at all in NYC while I did have some cultural shock in Hanover, Germany (I kept visiting CeBIT, the world largest IT exhibition). As a post-communist Eastern European, integrating in the American fabric was an instant feat, but the German fabric needed some serious readjusting.
Food for thought...
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
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).
"A "Brand" is something that requires a large scale organization to be effective."
Nonsense. A business with one single person still has a brand. Even if you have no logo, your name, your reputation, how you present yourself to customers, how you communicate, all form part of your brand identity. A brand does not equal a logo, the logo is simply a symbol that helps communicate elements of your brand identity. Many individual business people use Facebook, twitter, and blogging as a way to market themselves and contribute to that identity, sometimes very effectively.
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/