I enjoyed your take on crowd souring and was amused by your sarcasm. I do know that most of the design industry hates these sort of sites as they believe it degrades the profession. Having owned a design shop from 1996-2000, I do share your concerns about this emerging practice. It’s also getting a lot of PR these days.

I have to confess that I did try one of the crowd sourcing sites for a logo and was very pleased with the results I received. Not only did I get a logo that I really like, it was fun watching the entries come in and the ideas that folks came up with that I never even dreamed of. Unfortunately, you don’t get amount of creative input going with a single design shop. And, for a couple hundred bucks I got a logo that I can be proud of with several rounds of revisions (included at no charge). I also found out the artist was a teacher in Indonesia who has a sick wife that he needed to earn extra money for to help pay for her medical bills as they don’t have insurance. Since then, he’s done two other logos directly.

That said, I’m glad I found your site and may end up using you guys for a specific project (I share your belief in supporting “paid” designers as well).

There is a need for crowd sourcing sites. I’m sure you guys will continued to flourish if you keep doing what appears to be excellent work (and focusing on your clients and speedy turn times).

My opinion is that there is room for all if you… and competition is good as it makes us all strive to do even better and stand out from the rest.

Cheers,

Brian

I’m ‘biased’ so my opinions don’t count? That should preclude any further discussion or debate so we won’t.

Let me just say this. I’m not threatened by crowdsourcing sites. If push ever came to shove, we’d simply launch one of our own, and choke back the notion of designers working on our site for free, while raking in a percentage of whatever the winners make. “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em kind of mentality. Might even mean less overhead, less taxes, less accounting, less pesky government regulations, all of which would equate to more profit.

At the moment, we don’t have to do that and pay designers for all the work they do for our studio. I think that’s a nicer notion, no?

Many of these designers are hobbyists, students or professionals who work for design firms for their day job.

Being a logo design company, you are obviously very biased so your opinions don’t really count. It’s not cool to bad mouth a different approach just because you feel a little bit threatened by it.