If you’re a graphic designer, have you ever thought about competing in a design contest somewhere? For those of you who don’t know what crowd-sourcing is; here is a quick explanation. There usually is an original poster (a company or small business owner) on a design forum or contest site that sets the prize amount and the specifications. Then, a bunch of contestants post up concept proofs and samples for critique. Many times today design firms even have to contribute hours of man hours in order to “compete” for a job. Many times they end up getting the shaft, because they are up against many other firms in the process. So, I guess there is crowd sourcing going on to an extent, even at the professional level.

Are There Any Benefits to Crowdsourcing for a Designer?
These contests are great for students or those trying to develop their portfolios, but in actuality participating in these low budget contests is undermining the industry. Don’t give away your work for free, no matter if you’re new at something, or highly experienced. Design time is money, so unless you’re doing charity work you just might be barking up the wrong tree. I’ll admit – I was a sucker once.  I’ve participated in crowd sourcing when I was young and stupid; but hey, you live and you learn.  Back when I was just out of college I had a little bit of free time in between graduation and landing my first day job, so I competed in a handful of logo contest. I found one flier design job that I nailed and then it led to some additional freelance work from that business owner. Don’t expect this to happen every time, though. In the end, after I tallied up all of the hours wasted on these design contests, that little bit of assignment work I got was not even worth all of my time and efforts spent in crowdsourcing. In the end, the only parties that, I think, benefit from crowdsourcing are the contest holders and the crowdsourcing websites. The businesses are getting a huge variety of entries, but the majority of times they’re receiving crap-tacular designs from inexperienced ones that just got their first copy of Photoshop or Illustrator. You’ve seen the contests… if you want to see the caliber of design aesthetics just go to any of the major design contest websites.

So in the end, are the original contest posters really benefiting from having so many different proofs to choose from? Evidently not. You get what you pay for.  Some of the entries might be very good, actually deserving of traditional commissions of upwards of $1000-2000 for such a design.  This is, in fact, that company’s corporate identity.  I know you can’t really put a price on that, but do you think that $100-250 is really enough?  And remember, that’s ONLY if you win. If you’ve up against 50 other designers, that’s only a two percent chance that you’re actually going to win.

Other Concerns
I really don’t care where you live or how little you need to earn in order to pay your bills.  Don’t undersell yourself!  Sometimes the original poster will even choose an uglier design over a more professional one… because, well; beauty is is the eye of the beholder.  If you’re a designer and haven’t had to dumb down one of your best designs just to please the client, then you must be new at this. Also – there is a lot of theft going on nowadays – lots of “right click -> save as” or screenshotting and auto-tracing fun, as well.  I’ve even had some of my stock images retraced and resold on the same website I was selling mine on.  For what it’s worth, if you’re going to be posting up hours of your design time, even in low web-resolution screenshots, make sure you watermark them at the very least.

Just please – take what I’ve said here with a grain of salt.  Be wise. Think before you crowd source.

Tags: contests, crowd, crowd source, crowd sourcing, crowdsourced, crowdsourcing, design theft, fireworks, Graphic Design, image theft, logo contests, logo theft, silhouettes

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 4th, 2010 at 10:46 AM and is filed under Graphic Design, Web Design / UI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.