The Berkeley Digital Media Conference, > play, scheduled for October promises to be a heady event. Hosted by the University of Berkeley and the Haas School of Business, > play bills itself thusly:
not just a different and innovative business school conference, but also as being an exceptional industry conference. >play will focus on the creative side of the digital media industry in addition to business models. It will bring together creative professionals (artists, developers, and producers), industry leaders, and students to provide multiple perspectives on industry trends and challenges.
Sounds pretty cool. According to their web site, last years event saw attendance by such industry leaders as Yahoo, Apple, Lucas Arts, Electronic Arts, Adobe, Intel, Palm and Pixar, leaders in the creative media fields (and in the case of Adobe Systems – a keynote speech by President and COO Shantanu Narayen, the irony of which will be apparent in a sec’). Hoisting your corporate flag at the event ain’t cheap either – according to the ‘sponsorship menu‘ – prices ranges from $100,000 to $30,000 for exclusive Platinum exposure, to $5,000 for come one, come all Bronze Level sponsorships. Sounds like a great event to participate in, and probably worth the sponsorshp price for the level of exposure attained. Fair enough, but why are we even bringing this up on this sunny Saturday morning? Because, as is becoming more and more the case, the logo for this five-star event was developed by yet another logo design contest. The prize? A $50 gift certificate to Amazon.com. Alas, I wish I was kidding. But I’m not.
Now, I’m sure the gang at > play are basically fine folks, but a $50.00 gift certificate (from one of the sponsors I guess) for the logo that’s going to represent a high-profile conference that’s offering sponsorships of up to $100,000 a pop? C’mon people – get a grip. In the interest of full disclosure, should also point out that anyone that entered the contest, abiding by the guidlines – but didn’t win – also received a $10 gift certificate. Once again, to Amazon. And those guidelines? Usual stuff, except for this -
By entering the contest and submitting your design, your logo will become the property of DMEC, and you relinquish all claims to the intellectual property.
So, even if you didn’t win, you still gave up all the rights to whatever work you’ve submitted. And all for a $10 Amazon gift certificate. With the hopes (turned out your chances were one in eight) of winning another $50. Sheesh. Better start rehearsing “would you like to super-size that” as soon as I finish typing this post. I guess the thing that really sets off my irony detectors goes something like this –
The chosen winner must be able to provide an Illustrator file (.ai) of the design
Wow. Entrants had to supply the logo artwork as an Adobe Illustrator file – a format created by a software package that costs (if purchased legitimately anyway) around seven hundred bones. It’s also a software package developed by one of the previous ‘attendants’ – Adobe Systems – who were also represented as one of last year’s keynote speakers. One supposes that every entry – if they wanted any chance to win – would have to design the logo in Illustrator to begin with. Don’t really want to be a dick, but is this the kind of stuff that Adobe wants to be seen as encouraging? After all – aren’t they marketing their software as ‘professional stuff’, to ‘professional designers’? I kinda figured they were, epecially when you consider the sticker price of their nifty software packages Illustrator and Photoshop. Every new update seriously stresses out my credit card.
You can view contest entries, and winner here. The winning logo is described as “professional, looks techy and cutting edge, and incorporates our school colors- blue and gold”. So ‘professional’ is certainly a barometer in how effective the logo might be. Wonder why it wasn’t a factor when it came to paying for it?
Think I should point out that I’m not grousing about some home-made blog asking their ‘community’ to create a logo in order to make their website look ‘nice’ – often involving the offering of an Amazon gift certificate or a few bucks to the winner. These types of contests are generally fun for all, and represent a chance for would-be designers to get involved in their favorite acre of cyberspace. While many graphic design purists may disagree with me here (some quite vocal in their opposition), I really don’t see any harm in this – to the folks holding the contest, the folks entering their designs or the graphic design industry in general. People who submit their logo concepts are doing so for the ‘bragging rights’ of designing the logo that will emblazon their favorite blog or forum masthead. The internet version of ‘Kilroy Wuz Here‘. These contests are merely an extension of the open-source nature of most of the Internet itself, and a refection of the ‘community’ atmosphere to many sites, blogs and forums. More often than not, the blog is not a professional affair (save a few Google Adwords here or there), but just another stop on the ever-expanding information highway. There’s nothing unfair, or underhanded, and these kind of contests have been around forever (hell – I had my first ‘professional’ design gig when I won a logo design contest for my high-school radio station. Was a $100 richer into the bargain). The logo design contests that I, and most in the graphic design community, have (or should have) an issue with are organized contests for professional outifts, sometimes national or even multinational companies, who view contests as a way of getting a load of design work for free. Or a $10 gift certificate. That’s just bad for business.
Now – “would you like to super-size that?”
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