Is Crowdsourcing the Death of the Design Firm?

It’s really tempting. You could get on a website, offer to pay as little as $300 for a logo, have dozens of designers from all over the world offer their work to you, and at the end of the day you pick only the one you want from (hopefully) dozens of glorious and cutting-edge design solutions. Why go to a designer nearby? Why pick up the phone to talk to anyone, or actually sit down with a real-live person face-to-face? Why bother with that when getting something designed could be as easy as…a few keystrokes away? And for a fraction of the normal price at that!

You’ve been tempted by crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing, according to Wikipedia, “is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a crowd) through an open call.” In the last few years, many websites have popped up that are meant to take the place of the pricier, personal relationship with a graphic design freelancer or design firm, by providing a forum where people can purchase custom logos and graphics through what is essentially a contest where there can be only one winner (and all the other participants walk away with no monetary compensation for their efforts).

Design contests in the graphic design industry have long been frowned upon. These contests started because someone wanted person all the benefits of a professionally-designed something without having to risk not liking what the hired person developed. So a contest ensued- previously on such websites as Craigslist – where there is a monetary “prize” was offered for the best t-shirt, illustration, logo, and any interested designer can participate. The problem with these contests was that as a designer, you were essentially putting in hours of work for no guarantee of any payment, not even if your design was a “winner.” If a person was so unscrupulous and stingy that they rejected the idea of hiring a person to do a job and having to actually (gasp!) pay them for their time and effort, then what’s to stop them from declaring a winner, using your “losing” design in their business and paying you nothing for it?

Just as there are no guarantees in dealing with unscrupulous buyers, there are equally no guarantees in dealing with desperate designers (such as the ones who are working for crowdsource sites like 99Designs). You could end up with a logo that’s a copy of a logo from a different part of the country or heck, the world. How would you know? Are you willing to stake your reputation on the fact that the designer behind the virtual curtain isn’t just recycling something already in existence?

I’ve visited sites like 99designs.com several times both last year and this year just to see how they’re doing and I’ve seen a marked degradation in design quality. Maybe 2009 was a particularly bad year, economically, and many good designers did work for that site just to stay busy. Maybe since then they’ve gotten more clients or have been hired by local firms. I don’t know. In any case, what I’m seeing these days on crowdsourcing sites are logos that are blatant rip-offs of other (international) logos, really bad recycled stuff and just inappropriate and amateurish design. The thing is, on many of these sites you have to pay at the end of the week for your project whether you like the product or not. And it’s not that cheap – $300 minimum for a basic logo, but people are paying $500-700 for medium quality. That’s just the logo. That doesn’t include anything else.

It’s my prediction that the push-a-button-and-get-a-design-cheap won’t take off in full for a few reasons:

1. The quality of those design contest websites depend on mostly developing country talent and therefore the truly talented won’t stick around. They’ll get a job or clients who are willing to pay for quality and one-on-one customer service.
2. You can’t really communicate with the designer  freely the way you would with someone you could e-mail directly or just talk to on the phone (not to mention if they don’t speak English or have poor English) to ask for special things or make changes in the future. You have to initiate a new project each time.
3. How do you handle things like edits to a publication? That’s like half the design process on things like brochures, newsletters and annual reports.
4. While you are entitled to a refund for your design project if you get cited for trademark and copyright infringement or if you can prove that the logo is defective in some way, chances are you will have already spent money on such things as business cards or other marketing collateral. Ooops.

So will crowdsourcing be the death of the design firm? I don’t think so. Bottom line is, you get what you pay for. It also depends on who you are and what you want. If you’re a start-up little mom n’ pop who just needs a drawing of a funny chicken to serve as a logo for your local sandwich shop, yeah, go ahead and hire one of these services for a few hundred dollars or less. But if you’re a company that’s going to be dealing with a lot of other businesses and your reputation is important to you, you’d better be careful. Know with whom you’re doing business. Hire accordingly.

Comments are closed.