We're in the process of rethinking our on-line presence/strategy and redesigning our website. We've already changed the homepage fairly drastically and continue to experiment with it, even as we reconsider our whole approach.
As part of the experimentation, I started a contest at 99Designs offering $500 for a "redesign" of our homepage. We asked contestants to keep all the elements, the colors, and the top navigation, and submit their ideas. In doing so, I semi-wittingly unleashed a boat-load of ire.
I say "semi" because I knew there was some controversy in the design world about the "ethics" of contests or crowd-sourcing more generally. I just didn't realize how much designers hated them. The comments posted on this thread on QBN have been, um, unflattering. People have also been commenting, critically though more civilly, on our Facebook page.
One Facebook commenter suggested that we take a poll of designers to see what they think about design contests. So here it is:
What do you think about design contests?
I can't believe I work for a company that is throwing a contest for their website design. You hire designers - hire one for the redesign!
Actually, we have hired designer, as I understand it. This thing was just an experiment. One, admittedly, that has gone somewhat awry...
Matt
You get better results with a contest or staff members can brainstorm to come up with something interesting for a design.
Eh, live and learn. Contests are the one thing that drive rates and quality down in our profession the fastest. You essentially get what you pay for when you cross that line.
Design is at a point in time where it finally (in many cases) has a seat at the boardroom table. It is one thing to have natural talent, but the education and experience to use it wisely is a very different and complex ability. It is not a circus trick, when done properly. :)
Personally, I would like to see the outcome of the contest. Was it a bunch of garbage designs these bloggers say they would be?
Was the experience bad because the system is flawed and the work entered was not quality work?
Or.
Was the experience bad because you recieved a bunch of hate mail and comments from anti-specwork designers?
I would say the experience was bad for both reasons. The designs weren't great (with all due respect to those who submitted them) and the hate mail etc. was, of course, a bummer.
The contest process is not as flawed as the opponents of contests seem to think, in part because the participants can actually contact the design sponsor (the absence or impossibility of such contact being one of the problems with contests, in their eyes). While some did do so, none of them asked the business related questions you might expect. A missed opportunity on their part, I suppose.
Ultimately, the real bad part of the experience was the fact that many in the design community feel beleaguered by current economic conditions and certain socio-technological trends like crowd-sourcing which tend to marginalize their skills. The erosion of economic stability and mounting uncertainty about the future are a powerful source of anxiety. In the eyes of some, our actions put us on the wrong side of that anxiety, and they let us have it.
Wouldn't it be a better idea to choose a designer to design your website (or front page, or whatever) based on designs they submitted which might have very little to do specifically with your site (ie allowing them to submit a portfolio piece) which still opens things up to 'unknown' designers to possibly get a foot-in, but reduces the lots of work-no pay idea... and, I feel, would take whatever positives there are with the contest ideology and leave much of the negatives behind (mostly because this is somewhat of a 2-tiered approach - taking the best of both).
There are, obviously, negatives to this as well (as you won't be certain that the best design hasn't been ripped off someone else) but one could make provision for that (via terms or picking top 10, and having meetings to decide on the best one for the job, etc)... just an idea as I was thinking about it...
Cameron - I agree that holding an open call for people to submit portfolio pieces in order to be selected for this project would have been better, in many ways.
Still, pretty much anything would have been then the way it ended up going down.
Matt
I randomly just saw the notice for this somewhere - maybe Facebook. And my initial reaction was in the "slap in the face" category. It falls well outside the AIGA's professional standards, ending solidly in the "spec work" category. Something that I'm pretty sure Aquent asks their designers not to do for clients normally... After all - you wouldn't want us not to bill for the time spent would you, hoping that the client chose one of ours at the end?
Especially if the "prize" is several decimal places short of the normal cost for such a project.
But I'm sure you've heard this all before. I just wanted to get it off my chest.
Thanks for the feedback, Liam. Your thoughts do indeed echo those of many others who weighed in here and elsewhere. I heard them, and you, loud and clear.
I appreciate you taking the time to comment.
Your statement:
In doing so, I semi-wittingly unleashed a boat-load of ire.
I say "semi" because I knew there was some controversy in the design world about the "ethics" of contests or crowd-sourcing more generally.
This is VERY telling. You obviously were not qualified for your position. Had you been you would have known that this isn't some fringe issue within the creative community. It's been in the guild handbook forever. I hope that when you rise to your next level of incompetence you are a little more suited to the task.
o
I am extremely disappointed in the last comment from "o". This life is a time of making poor choices (let the flames roll) and then learning from the consequences.
We each do it everyday. If we deemed someone unworthy because he/she made a poor choice than we would all be subject to the Darwin Awards. <wink />
I am not saying the decision was correct; I am only challenging that response that I see as unwarranted. The question is where do they go from here?
Touching an electric fence once, to see if it is on, is not the smartest thing. But getting shocked and then touching it again is just (for lack of a better word) stupid.
j
Protectionism at any new disruptive technology has been around for ages... Of course, designers are afraid of anything that would devalue their work, just as people were afraid of outsourcing programming work to India, manufacturing to China, and iStockPhoto for photographers.
Those in the industry will always work to perpetuate the status-quo, but history has shown that a good idea is hard to kill. So instead of whining and complaining, adapt because crowdsourcing isn't going away.
I stumbled upon this post after looking around for the position of designers hold on the CrowdSpring site.
Its pretty unfortunate what you (Aquent) did and considering the AIGA actively campaigns against spec work. Situations like this do damage your credibility of Aquent as a 'creative' recruiter as at the very least, it will make people question how well you know the industry.
If recruitment industry in the states are anything like it is over here in the UK, you are behind the '8 ball' already.
I agree with the poster above to a certain extent but I don't believe are the future. They are the future of publishing or the new 'DTP' but they are not design.
There is a difficulty to not be seduced by a new offering like crowdspring, but design is based on innovation, and sites like crowdspring do not lend themselves to producing innovative solutions. Partly, because the clients already have a pre-meditated idea of what they want from the outset.
Anyway, my 2 cents. Aquent should be promoting innovation. Perhaps an innovative way out of this is to run a new competition that can harness design thinking for the public good.
Thanks for the comment, Tim.
As you can tell, this conversation is still going on and I continue to learn from it.
Given the intense feelings generated by the contest, we pulled it and ended up offering payment to anyone who submitted a design. Some accepted the money, some did not, interestingly enough.
The three mains arguments against this or any contest were as follows:
1. Contests cheapen what designers do.
2. Good design results from collaboration and these contests don't allow the designer and the client to discuss the project and the objectives of the design.
3. It's the wrong way to find the right designer for your project.
On top of that, people pointed out that Aquent's decision to find a designer in this way undermined the value of the service we offer.
For what it's worth, here's my current take on these totally legitimate objections to the practice of "design by contest."
Firstly, I don't believe that contests necessarily cheapen the work of designers, but I understand how they can. On this front, we contributed to the problem by linking the phrase "Redesign Homepage" with "$500." First of all, "redesign," was a misnomer. We were actually asking for a mere rearrangement of the existing elements on the homepage. Nevertheless, this raised the possibility that someone could be pitching a homepage redesign to a client, ask several thousand dollars for the job, and have the client respond, "Well, Aquent says it's only worth 500 bucks." Whenever you are setting rates, you need to be able to justify them, obviously, but I regretted that we may have made that task more difficult.
There were at least two ways this could have been avoided. First of all, we could have offered a significantly larger amount of money. The aura of "spec" would have still hung over this whole deal, but we would have been making a broader statement about the value of homepage redesign (even if a redesign wasn't exactly what we were after). On the other hand, we could have offered nothing at all, but said, "We will display all entries and ask you to vote on your favorite." This way, we would have been offering people something in exchange for our work, namely exposure on our website, and thus mitigated some of the ire.
Secondly, I wholeheartedly agree that good design results from collaboration between designer and client. The contest we ran did not preclude this kind of collaboration. For example, I did not keep my identity secret and people were free to contact me directly. Indeed, some contestants did go so far as to ask for feedback on submitted designs, but none of them actually wanted to talk to me about why we were doing this, what business problem we were trying to solve, etc. It's not that they couldn't, they just didn't. There may be some contests that preclude this kind of interaction, but that was not the case here, just for the record.
Finally, contests are certainly not the most efficient way of finding the right designer, but they aren't the absolutely wrong way. We certainly know a lot of designers at Aquent, but we don't know all of them, and many submissions came from places - Argentina, Croatia, the Philippines - where we don't have a presence. Still, if we or anyone else wanted to find great unknown talent, it would be better to run a contest wherein people submitted their best (paid) work, and we created a panel of judges to assess it. Or something like that. In other words, you don't need to ask people to do potentially unpaid work for you, to find out if they are good or not.
Better yet, I supposed, instead of running a contest, you could consult an organization that is constantly on the lookout for new talent. Chances are they'll know someone you don't! Hmmm.
I know that that's what we do, and I understand that we damaged our credibility in some circles through this thing. Still, I think that we did the right thing by listening to the criticism, engaging with people, responding in a reasonable and equitable way, and providing a forum (here and on Facebook), for people to hash this out. Nevertheless, the fact that we did it at all was unforgivable in the eyes of some. There's not much I or we can do in the face of that except to acknowledge that people have a right to their opinions and try to continually improve ourselves going forward.
Thanks for the comprehensive reply.
There does indeed seem to be a lot of conjecture about services that sites like CrowdSpring offer. So in order to give atleast a self-informed opinion on the matter (from a designers perspective) I have decided to enter on of the 'competitions' and write about it on my blog: www.thebottlerocket.co.uk/blog/
Not sure how I will go or even if I will find the motivation to complete it but even that should be informative.
MATTHEW,
The problem is not contests themselves. The problem is compensating only a winner. If you selected few studios/designers and run a contest with equal fair compensation to all participating parties that would be absolutely OK. I don't see now contests that ALLOW designers to invest their time to gain required info, analyze it and produce a concept can cheap the industry.
Design contest, no problem. Spec work, lame. Winning an award (i.e., recognition in a prestigious contest) is great. Winning an insulting amount of money over peers that put hours in to get nothing is rude. I didn't vote because I think the issue being voted on (design contests) isn't the issue here. The issue is spec work. If you have the same question but change design contests to spec work, I'd vote that I hated it.
Years ago when I worked regularly with Aquent, they actually sent me on a job with other designers to do some identity/packaging spec work.
The difference? I was paid at a good Aquent hourly rate for my work. I did not "win" this job, but was still compensated fairly for the time I had put in.
My experience with Aquent was an extremely positive one. I'm even still personal friends with my old agents and people I met at the jobs I worked.
I have long since been permanently placed by Aquent and continue to work at that final job 4 years later.
Anyway. Shame on you guys for using "99 designs". It was simply a dumb decision. But, big kudos to you for ending it. I'm proud of all the insight you've gotten and for continuing to dialogue through it all. I think you'll be better off in the long run for the learning experiment.