The Evil of Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is a term for using lots of amateurs to achieve a goal for a company or organisation, usually for very little money.
For example: A company puts a brief out to a community of individuals (in this case designers), lets them know how much they wish to pay for the end result and waits for a response - if something comes in they wish to use, they only pay the person that came up with that idea.
Sounds good right? Wrong!
Well…that is unless you are a client that wants to avoid the time and consideration taken by a professional designer and go right to the teenager with no commercial experience that thinks he knows how to design - just because he created an ‘amazing’ logo for a school project once.
You also clearly don’t want any in-depth communication, or anyone that has an understanding of your company and its aspirations. Neither do you want to build any long term working relationships between you and a designer that could help your company going forward. You just want a logo for £150 and that’s that.
Without singling any one of these sites out we’ve taken 99designs as an example simply due to it being one of the more popular sites. This website works by soliciting speculative work from its community of registered designers. As a designer, you can’t just bid on a project - you actually have to do it, submit it and then pray to god that the client likes it. If not, you have completely wasted your time (and let’s be honest, when you’re competing against any number of 99designs community of 36,586 “talented” designers you don’t really stand a lot of chance). In the end there’s no doubt that the designer is extremely happy with his payout and that the client is chuffed to bits with his logo he got for a bargain, but what about all those other designers that worked their arse off for nothing?
Probably a good time to look at the figures involved. 99designs has currently awarded a healthy sum of $5,172,364 to its community of registered designers and there has been 1,905,380 designs entered. Sounds like a lot of money until you divide the amount of money by the number of entries, putting a value of $2.71 on each piece of work. Now you can start seeing the real story.
This undermines all of the hard-working, talented designers that make a living building long term client relations, creating amazing, original work and putting their all in to everything that they do.
In Short
Clients: If you want a second rate job - by all means use a crowdsourcing website such as 99designs or crowd spring, but at least you now know what you are going to get (usually what you have paid for).
Designers: Never lower yourself to enter these competitions. Crowdsourcing is evil, it’s killing our industry and devalues our profession. Remember, if you are good at something you should never do it for free.
You may be interested in the following news & articles as well.
Please feel free to comment and share your thoughts. These are our opinions so please feel free to view your own.
Start following us on twitter 
@FHOKE