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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.
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.
But...the unwashed masses might PICK THE WRONG FONT...the horror...the horror...
You could convince the /b/tards that this is a fun way to fuck with The Man... Anyone can set up as a designer. Then the signal to noise on 99 designs will drop through the floor and it'll be 99 Designs that has to adapt or die.
-- "Oh. This guy again."
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
I'm being honest about where rights come from: agreements between individuals. I'm not advocating using violence, I'm saying, we don't have to agree to do things the way we do. That 'private transaction?' Is it really private? Says who? Two parties arguing over the price of a slave would tell an abolitionist that the transaction is none of their business, and society used to agree with the slavers. Now, thanks to people expressing their opinion, we do not consider that transaction a private matter anymore. I imagine that some transactions we presently see as private will, in the future, be seen as impacting others outside the transaction, and thus not private. CEO pay may well become one of those things that, like slavery, we don't consider a private matter.
You may not believe me, but freedom is my goal. You see, money is power, and someone with money can limit the freedom of someone without. I don't want to end the wealth disparity do much as I want to end the power disparity, which I see as limiting freedom. You probably see the power disparity as a natural consequence of freedom, but 'freedom' is a slippery word that way. Do I have the freedom to swing my fist wherever I like, or do you have the freedom not to get hit in the face? How about pollution? Do I have the right to buy garbage and bury it on my land, or do the externalities involved make that your business, too?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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
> "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.
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
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.
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