Crowdsourcing: Friend or Foe?

I had never heard of this term “crowdsourcing” before until a colleague mentioned it to me a couple of months ago, which raised a lot of questions about the value placed on quality design. In the many years that I have been working as a designer, one of the biggest things that I have and will always pride myself on is my ability to produce high quality results for each and every client, giving them something more unique and trying to push the realms of design forward, rather than standing still or doing what has already been done. I follow a process, have personal relationships with my clients, and strive to give them the best possible results for their dollar. I have never been one to try to whip up something quickly and without following a specific process, just for an easy dollar. Nor have I done this for free.

Crowdsourcing is a means for people to attain a lot of design work for very little costs. From a designers-perspective, it feels wrong and cheap. If you are a neophyte at design or a recent grad student, it can offer a lot of good opportunities to gain experience and build your portfolio. That being said, it also teaches young designers that it is okay to work for free unless your designs are picked. It also works against the design process, and these newbys are learning bad examples of producing design. It means that as time goes on, the quality of design may not be so innovative as it once was. With technological advances, and things being more accessible to the masses, it makes it difficult for those of us ‘true’ designers to compete in this economy. The design-world is a funny one in that it is totally speculative – someone may say one design is amazing while someone else may think a totally different way. Who is to say who is right and who is wrong.

I believe that spec design is causing a shift in the population’s point of view about the value of good design vs. mediocre design. If you know anything about the design process, you will know that spec-design does not follow that process. It does not encourage breakthrough new design ideas or a community working for the betterment of the company, rather it pins designers against each other in order to win the prize (even if that prize is only a couple hundred dollars for hours and hours of time and energy). The demand for low-end design continues to increase due to the unfortunate downturn of the economy and more and more people who are actually quite talented and can afford to earn a decent living without taking this route are working for free out of desperation. But that raises a big question; Do you really think you are getting great results from a desperate designer? Do you really think these people care enough about you and your company to give you something amazing, or just something passable?

I have also found with crowdsourcing leads to other problems like design-poaching, which is where someone steals someone else’s creative design ideas and reformat’s them as their own. To a point, this type of thing has gone on for many years, but with spec-design it is quite literally right out in the open. One example that recently occurred to me was when I tried spec-design myself just as an experiment. I found a company willing to pay a bit more for a nice website, and opted into the contest. I found that the designs prior to mine were pretty poor and not very unique amongst themselves. When I posted my design, within about 8 hours, there were about 10 other submissions that pretty much took the work that I had created and reformatted it as their own. It feels unfair that someone else can take advantage of this space, and more-so that a designer would want to do this? But like I said, its about making money not making something amazing.

In the end, a lot of the general population can’t really tell the difference between mediocre and amazing design…in their minds it isn’t that big a leap. In a quality designer’s mind, it is astronomical. It also helps to create a population that will not be educated around good design and what that means, rather a way to exploit creative people for their resources. This leaves a designer with a few options. You can choose to take the low-road and attempt the spec-design path, or you can choose to deny it, ignore it, fight against it. A lot of world-renowned ‘design’ organizations like AIGA stand against spec-design. I think that there is still a community that desires quality and personal relationships for their business, and I can only hope, for those of us who are designers pushing the boundaries of what has been done into new plains, that we can continue to be valued and appreciated for our hard work and paid for it.

I want to ask you, would you go to work every day and spend hours and hours doing something, with only a slight chance of being paid for that work, as if in competition? It feels almost as low as sweatshop labor, and is this really something that the design community is supporting? I, for one, can not do what I do best knowing that it will be taken for granted.