Steve Douglas on August 16th, 2010

Logo design contests and their host sites are marketed to clients as presenting ‘lots of choice’ from their huge ‘communities’. Trouble is, many of the design ‘choices’ are toxic, and many of the ‘community’ members are unrepentant plagiarists. Sadly, sometimes they even win. I’m so sick of this crap that I’m almost loathe to write [...]

Continue reading about The plain truth about logo design contests

As evidenced by features on NPR and in Forbes, spec work, crowdsourcing and design contests remain the darlings of the business media. Sadly, many of the inflated claims made are left unchallenged and become the accepted truth, when often times, they’re not really true at all. Conversations about spec work and crowdsourcing have turned up [...]

Continue reading about The Crowdsourcing Dilemma. Spec work, crowdsourcing and Crowdspring on NPR

How design contest and crowdsourcing sites refund and guarantee policies protect their service charges while the risk and exposure of unpaid designers, working on spec, is almost 100% whether contests are ‘guaranteed’ or not. We’ll begin this post with a simple question. What do spec, design contest and crowdsourcing sites sell? Logo design? Uh-uh. Web [...]

Continue reading about The dirty little secret that most spec, design contest & crowdsourcing sites don’t want designers to know

Steve Douglas on May 19th, 2010

Should designers take a zero tolerance position with design contests, crowdsourcing, and spec work? Or is there some ‘wiggle room’ that allows us all to co-exist peacefully in in the design industry? Turns out, it may all come down to intent. And how we define the issue itself. Based on a couple of events over [...]

Continue reading about Crowdspecking

Steve Douglas on May 13th, 2010

If you’re new to The Factor blog, you may run into the occasional odd expressions and confusingly made-up words when reading our Blatherfests (that would be one). Accordingly, here’s a Lexicon of our special phrases to help you better understand what the hell the writers around here are trying to say. Blatherfest: A long, rambling [...]

Continue reading about The Logo Factory Lexicon