Why Designers Hate Crowdsourcing 569
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."
The answer to this has been in print since 1913 (Score:4, Informative)
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.
GIANTS TALK LIKE THIS (Score:4, Informative)
Nude No More!
Re:Angry? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Quote: (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Stop Working for Content Mills (Good Luck...) (Score:5, Informative)
I was right there with you, until A WILD DICTIONARY APPEARS:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/niggardly [reference.com]
1. reluctant to give or spend; stingy; miserly.
2. meanly or ungenerously small or scanty
Origin:
1520–30
Whereas the word you object to has origins of 1640–50 ( http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/nigger [reference.com] )
So, how's that foot tasting?
Re:Stop Working for Content Mills (Good Luck...) (Score:1, Informative)
I was right there with you until you proved your limited vocabulary.
Noun 1. niggard - a selfish person who is unwilling to give or spend [perhaps of Scandinavian origin; related to Swedish dialect nygg and Old English hnaw stingy]
It is relevant because he's talking about stingy employers/clients. Chaucer was writing about niggards in the late 1300's... a little bit before the racial slur you're thinking about.
google, ftw
Re:Angry? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Makes sense...I'd be angry in their shoes too.. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Angry? (Score:3, Informative)
A system like this has already been in effect for years. RentACoder (now vworker [vworker.com]) 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 [99designs.com] 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.
Re:Angry? (Score:3, Informative)
"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.
Re:An Industry Ripe for Change... (Score:2, Informative)
but I am an Indian
Why would a tube of toothpaste be completely colored green -- did green have some special significance to Indians that we didn't understand?
but the answer for that rings bells all over my head
yes yellow,green and red are very special for Indians.
Because these colors run so deep into our culture, customs and tradition, I bet every Indian even who is below poverty line and very rich can relate to these almost immediately
Yellow reminds/represents Haldi [wikipedia.org] has been used for household medicine and food color for centuries
Red reminds/represents Sindoor [wikipedia.org] (wonder why some call us DOTS)
Green reminds/represents many leafy things but most importantly Neem [wikipedia.org] has been used for medicine and brushing teeth (yes) for centuries