AIGA takes on Seattle music festival Bumbershoot, the crowdsourcing secrets ‘They’ are keeping from you (according to Mycroburst anyway) and an attempt to rebrand crowdsourcing itself by 99designs and Genius Rocket.
Previously, and every year, Seattle’s famous music festival Bumbershoot, has contracted a local designer, or design firm, to come up with the creatives for advertising and promotional goodies. From what 
I’ve seen, some of the stuff from previous incarnations was pretty sweet too (right). This year, supposedly to celebrate the festival’s 40th anniversary, officials decided to hold a logo design contest to develop a more permanent fixture that can be used in upcoming years as well. The winner of chosen logo won’t pick up any loot for their creative efforts, but will receive a VIP pass to this years event, scheduled for September. The reaction? Yep. Anti spec work freakout, with bunch of carping on Twitter, and dozens of negative comments on the Bumbershoot blog post that announced the gig. Interestingly, the Seattle chapter of the AIGA has come out pretty publicly on this one, and uncharacteristically prickly as this article on the Seattle Weekly website will attest to. In it, AIGA chapter president Jeff Barlow warned that “if Bumbershoot does go through with the contest, there will be a firestorm of negative reaction.” Pretty strong words that. Apparently, Bumbershoot officials are willing to talk things over with local designers and what not, but aren’t expected to back down on holding the contest. Alright lads, cue up the firestorm.
Update:
After discussions with board members of the Seattle chapter of the AIGA, Bumbershoot organizers have abandoned the logo contest referred to in this post, or at least altered it greatly. More here. Guess we can save the firestorm for a later time.
The other night I received a Twatter from a nice chap in Karachi, offering to reveal the “5 Things they Don’t want You to Know about Crowdsourcing“. DIdn’t know who this helpful lad was. Or who ‘They‘ were. Or why ‘They’ would keep such important crowdsourcing knowledge from me. Apparently he had been very helpful
, practically a Twitter spree of helpfulness, hitting up a lot of designers with the same message. Lots and lots and lots of designers, many of whom I recognized as being vocal critics of spec work and design contests at one time or another. He wasn’t the only kind soul either
. The link they had so thoughtfully provided led to a Mycroburst blog post that did indeed offer to tell us the “Five Things they Don’t want You to Know about Crowdsourcing”. Trouble is, according to the weirdly confrontational 
ramble, I would be one of the “They, ” ie: a critic of design crowdsourcing, and apparently one of the people keeping people from knowing the five pearls of goodness that is spec work. Who or what is Mycroburst? Why, it’s another ‘me-too’ logo design contest site, operated by the same organization as Logo Design Guru and the nice people we met in last week’s Dear Nora brouhaha. Though, if I could offer just one suggestion to the folks at Mycroburst? You should make it “Six Things they Don’t want You to Know about Crowdsourcing”, the sixth being established crowdsourcing sites don’t like the name no more, because of sites like yours using it. To whit:
Despite the ‘democratization of design’ and ‘leveling the playing field’ tub-thumping, apparently there’s some snootiness breaking out in design contest site circles. A couple of early arrivals to the scene, 99designs and Genius Rocket, have decided that they don’t like the name crowdsourcing any more. Too crowded, doesn’t fit and it “doesn’t distinguish (them) from all the others in the crowdsourcing space.” Which might be seen as a tad elitist, and all kinds of extraordinary, considering the effort they went to, trying to get themselves called just that. They’ve even launched this exercise in cognitive dissonance, a website entitled Project: Rename Crowdsourcing (above left), which asks people to come up with an alternative name, for the chance of winning a thousand bucks for doing so. Oddly, and while I’m often behind the curve on most stuff, looks like I was a little prophetic on this one. Just last week I had written a piece that opined that design contest sites were conflating a couple of concepts in order to market their services under the crowdsourcing banner and even offered up an alternative name, crowdspecking, to more accurately describe what’s what.
They can use that for free
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It’ll be interesting to see the alternative name for “crowdsourcing” that the “industry leaders” end up using. I notice on their website they are not showing and rating the entries so far – which is a shame. I was hoping to combine a couple of the highest rated ones to form my entry and win the $1,000 prize!
Latest Post: How the Pros and Cons of Spec Work Impact You
Oh! that was too bad.