Recently I wrote about how I lost a client to crowdsourcing and today’s post follows on from that. There are many articles out there about why crowdsourcing is bad for designers and the design industry as a whole so I won’t repeat the argument. This post is inspired by a recent conversation I had about crowdsourcing, and will focus instead on why crowdsourcing is a bad idea for clients.
On hearing I’m a graphic designer, someone I had just met asked if I knew of sites like 99Designs as they’re “brilliant”; a friend of his had posted a logo design competition there and apparently received so many quality designs.
Completely incredulous that someone would mention design competitions to a professional designer, I quickly composed myself and realised that he probably just didn’t know how most designers feel about crowdsourcing (clue: we pretty much hate it!).
For those of you who aren’t sure what crowdsourcing actually is, a client posts a design competition on one of the crowdsourcing sites then sits back while potentially hundreds of designers around the world post their ideas in the hope of winning the cash prize.
I can see how this would be appealing to some clients – it can be cheaper than hiring a local freelance designer, and if they do receive the promised hundreds of entries, there’s plenty of logo designs to choose from, compared to just a few if they were to work with just one designer.
However, there are many drawbacks to crowdsourcing compared to hiring a freelance designer directly:
Quality control
Firstly, hundreds of designers may be entering the competition, but the client has no idea who those designers are. They might be professional designers, but they could just as easily be schoolkids with no design training or experience, and armed only with a pirated copy of Photoshop.
So the client has no guarantee of the quality of the entries they’ll receive.
When a client hires a designer directly though, they can view the designer’s portfolio to see the usual quality of their work and meet with the designer to build a rapport and gauge their professionalism.
No dialogue
Design competition briefs usually contain only basic information about the project and there’s not usually much, if any, contact between the client and designers during the competition. The client has the option of posting feedback on the entries, but a lot of the time they don’t bother.
With so little information to work with the style and overall concepts of the entries may not be suitable for the client or their target market, and some entries will be little more than clip-art.
When working with a freelance designer there should be in-depth discussion before and during the project so that the designs created are appropriate and relevant to the brief.
Too much choice
It might sound ideal getting so many different ideas for one fee, but there is such a thing as too much choice and if the client receives many entries it might be hard choosing a winner. However, even with so many entries, there’s no guarantee that the client will like any of them.
Obviously there’s no guarantee that the client will like the work done by a freelance designer either, but all the discussions with the designer about the project should make it likely that the client will like the work. And at least if they hire a designer, they can discuss the work and why they dislike it thereby creating new ideas or developping the existing ones into something they do like.
Copyright
As crowdsourced projects are competitions with hundreds of entries but only one winner, most of the designers who enter aren’t going to get paid for their work. As a result, many designers take a quantity over quality approach, throwing together ideas as quickly as possible in order to enter as many competitions as they can to increase their chances of winning one.
Aside from the issues of quality that this approach raises, however, some designers have taken this even further. There are many documented cases of designers submitting the same idea to multiple competitions, or even worse, ripping off a logo design that already exists, which if the client were to choose that design, would leave them open to being sued for copyright infringement.
Decent freelance designers tend to take a quality over quantity approach instead, and if the client decides to hire a local freelancer, they can ask around to find out if the designer has a good reputation.
As you can see there are many drawbacks to using crowdsourcing, some of them quite serious. I truly believe that clients receive a better service by hiring a freelance designer directly – after all, if crowdsourcing was really as great as it’s made out to be, I’d be entering the competitions, wouldn’t I?
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