It’s easy to understand why clients and buyers find an appeal in spec work and crowdsourcing. Nothing to lose, everything to gain. Oodles of free design work and “lots of choice.” But what about participating designers? How do they fare in the “new reality?”
Over the years I’ve been a pretty vocal critic of spec work and crowdsourcing, both as a business owner and as a designer (the related posts at the bottom of this one will lead you to several of my screeds). For this post, however, we’re going to leave the criticism aside. In fact, for the sake of this exercise we’re going to take the talking points of pro-crowdsourcing advocates at face value and try to determine how ‘worthwhile’ spec work and crowdsourcing is, solely from the point of view of a designer. As a way of making a sustainable living. In order to gather enough information, and to paint the rosiest picture we can, we’ll take a look at the TOP FIVE PERFORMERS (very important to keep in mind) of the major logo design contest and crowdsourcing sites. I don’t want to bag on any designers, so wherever appropriate I’ve blurred out names and avatars. The information is available at the links provided.
Crowdspring
Chicago’s Crowdspring call themselves the fastest growing design crowdsourcing site in the world, and with a claimed number of designers on the plus side of 80,000 can’t really blame them. Like most design contest sites, Crowdspring has an open roster of ‘creatives’ that ranks designers on the total number of entries submitted. Here’s the top five –
Logo Tournamnent
Logo Tournament also ranks their designers by total number of entries and features a rating system that involves cute little trophies. Here’s the top five designers there –
Mycroburst
Logo Design Guru’s Mycroburst does all the work for us, presenting win ratios as part of their designer listings. Predictably, because their ‘community’ is much smaller, the win ratios of their ‘leading’ designers are a little higher than the other sites featured.
Logo My Way
Logo My Way stacks their designer directory by number of contests won, so their listings are a very real indication of the win/participation of their site. Once again, the top five (we skipped over the actual third place designer because they’ve been suspended for six months) -
99designs
Australia’s 99designs hasn’t been included in our little survey because they don’t feature a searchable directory of their designers (probably to avoid exercises of this very nature). While the foremost logo design contest platform boasts a ‘community’ of over 190,000 in their advertising and Twitter page, they’ve started to dial-back on the claims on their website. Those numbers are probably inflated all to hell, because guess what happens when you want to cancel your account at 99designs? You can’t
Takeaway
So what did we learn from this exercise? Couple of things. The first, and most notable, is that your chances of winning a design contest is much higher on sites with smaller “communities.” Only makes sense. If design contests and crowdsourcing are your bag, for the tme being anyway, it seems like Mycroburst is your best option. Trouble is, the larger the “community”, the more participation, greater number of entries and much less chance of rising above the noise. The second thing we can sort of learn (admittedly unscientific mind you) is that if you’re a decent designer and enter a helluva lot of contests, your win average will probably fall within the 6 – 9.5% range. Put another way, if you’re a decent designer and put in the time, you can expect to get paid for 1 contest in 10 to 15. Paid for 1 hour out of 10 to 15. And between 90% to 94% of your time spent will be for naught. If, as a professional designer, you’re okay with those odds, have at it.
Don’t think I’ll be joining you anytime soon.
Related Posts
- Snippets: Spec work & crowdsourcing edition
- Numbers – The ever-shifting realities of crowdsourcing and design contest sites.
- Spec work hackery redux. More of our work copied & entered into 99designs logo design contest
- Yet another anti-spec work initiative
- The Crowdsourcing Dilemma. Spec work, crowdsourcing and Crowdspring on NPR
I have to comment on this one. First, thank you for the stats on submissions vs awards. Astounding that so many individuals are spending so much time producing artwork and not getting paid.
What if they re-invested that time into networking and sales/marketing initiatives to their niche market? I bet they’d have a higher rate of return and most likely earn more money! (I calculate that the average is approx 11% win ratio of those presented here.)
‘Nuf said. Time to call some clients and followup on work-in-progress.
It’s a sad state of affairs to witness the devaluation of the design industry. It started with the small 1 year schools competing with the university, and producing designers without the higher education of art history, theory, etc. Today in some cases we have logos without the story, without meaning. Thanks for begining this to our attention.
I’m probably not the only one who’s said this, but the ultimate result of spec work could be a shortage of freelance artists. After all, very few people can afford to do graphic design jobs for free on an indefinite basis.
Great work putting this together. This post is very educational and a sad reminder that no one wins by doing spec work and crowd sourcing.
[...] Steve Douglas’ recent blog post “The grim realities of spec work and crowdsourcing” he analyzes how graphic designers fare financially with crowdsourcing. His results show that [...]
Excellent commentary and posts.
As one blogger commented, “the problem started with the small 1 (actually 2) year schools competing with the universities.” Certainly schools and universities are equally to blame as is the profession of graphic design. We all saw the future, certainly Paul Rand did, and we did little to protect ourselves from the globalization of graphic design as a cheap commodity.
As professionals, we should have mobilized to legitimize the importance of graphic design by insuring and mandating professional licensing/certification in order to practice the profession. After all, are graphic designers less important than licensed hair dressers, florist, Realtors, to name a few?
Thank you for bringing awareness to these issues.
Well, I feel that those crwowsourcing sites only attract crappy designers who can’t get real paid clients and cheap clients who don’t value what a good design can do for them.
Good article, 100%agree. All sites above have “codes of conducts” for designers and CH’s
. These are no more than flea markets and thrift store buyers, bargain hunters meet masters of cheesy logos. How sweet. In this crowdsourcing scam is hiding a big evil. Greed.
WARNING to any designer thinking about opening an account with 99designs…You will not be able to close your account.
I am posting this because of the deplorable, unprofessional and deceitful attitude shown towards designers on this site. I have been submitting designs in contests on this and other sites over the last eight months and have now, due mainly to lack of time decided to close them all. This seemed simple enough until I made the same polite request to 99designs to close my account. It seems they ‘cannot’ delete my account despite my repeated requests to do so. Not only will they not do this but they evade my question as to ‘why and refuse to offer any explanation as to why. However what they do repeatedly ‘offer’ is to falsify my account by changing my name and email address to something completely false and suspend this fictitious account….this whole situation has become totally astonishing.
In all my years in the design and art world, which started in 1973 and has included work for many of the larger high street brand names and book publishers, I have never come across such underhand deceit from an organisation that is supposed to be Professional. I am only left to conclude their reason for not letting designers go is to maintain the illusion of credibility by stating they have 80,000 designers on their books ready and waiting to produce designs…how many of these are fictitious ?…..how can this figure of 80,000 be genuine and substantiated ? how many other designers have had their accounts suspended in this way. There actions are completely deplorable and just drag down the design profession.
Because their attitude has become so hostile I though you all might like to see the complete transcript of the e.mail correspondence between us………………….astonishing……..
1st message sent to their support dept on Wed 9th Feb 2011
Hi,
Although I have only been with you a short while I would now like to
close my account with 99 designs. Please could you remove all my info and
previous graphics from your site as soon as possible.Thank you for your
time and services.
Best wishes,
Steve Adams
On 11/02/2011 03:15, 99designs Support wrote:
Hi Steve,
Apologies but we are not able to delete your account – you can however
remove your entries if you wish to.
Kind regards
Ryan
99designs Customer Support
On Sun, 13 Feb 2011 22:06:13 +1100, Steve Adams wrote:
> Hi Ryan,
>
> Please could you explain WHY you cannot delete my account and all my
> associated graphics.
>
> I have just closed my other two accounts with – click 360 and
> CrowdSpring without any problems., so why can’t you do the same.
>
> Regards
> Steve
On 17/02/2011 02:19, 99designs Support wrote:
> Hi Steve,
>
> Thanks for your email.
>
> What we can do is change your username, email and suspend your account if you like?
>
> Kind Regards,
>
> Ryan
> 99designs Support Team
On Fri, 18 Feb 2011 02:01:26 -0800, Steve Adams wrote:
> Hi Ryan,
>
> Thanks for your offer but–
> I DO NOT want
> 1. You to change my username
> 2. Change my e.mail
> 3. Suspend my account
>
> All I want you to do is CLOSE my account and remove all my graphics, it
> seems simple enough to me.
> As none of my entries in 36 contests were chosen as the winner none of
> my work is being used by anyone.
> You are very fond of reminding designers of their responsibilities
> regarding a professional attitude to work and clients, now it’s time for
> you to do the same, act professionally and close my account.
>
> Regards
> Steve
Hi Steve,
Thanks for getting back to us! Unfortunately, we cannot delete your account. As previously discussed, we are more than happy to change all of your account details and suspend the account – which essentially is the same thing as deleting it since you will not be associated with the account anymore at all at that point.
Please let me know if you’d like me to do that. Again, we cannot delete your account.
Thanks Steve!
Regards,
Justin
99designs Support Team
Hey Steve,
Go onto the (whoremill of your choice) and change your information using a yahoo mail account (make one up) and once the profile is updated, cancel the yahoo mail account. Let the pimps search for their stable in vain.
Hugo
Grim and Grimmer
Just when you think things couldn’t get wet much worse…I think they can.
According to your well informed statistics regarding the win ratio percentage on CrowdSpring things look pretty dismal, however it’s actually worse than that when it comes to the fees paid out.
You will notice on your page snapshots from the top designers amongst the small icons at the top of each page, which are the winning designs from that particular designer, there are also silver trophy cups. What these represent are not ‘Wins’ as such but ‘Awards’ given to a designer by CrowdSpring for a design chosen by them at the end of the contest when the client decides not to pay up. The amount they pay the designer for this is $100, so the original contest fee, which could well be $1,000 or more encouraging hundreds of designs, (I have entered many such contests) is never actually paid to the winning design anyway. What is particularly important here is the proportion of ‘Trophy Awards (wins) there are in each designers results, this also represents how many contest are withdrawn by the clients. I have noticed the same, whenever I have checked out high contests winners most if not all are littered with these Trophies. Added to this it’s often impossible to view the trophy ‘winning’ designs. Do they really choose the best designs for their award ??? ……because it doesn’t really matter anyway…….. it’s anybodies guess.
Mr. Adams’ comments is case-and-point about how crazy this industry has become. The internet has not only created opportunity but also a global feeding frenzy of grand proportion upon which there is no end to the madness of ‘Crowd Sourcing’. What seems like a good thing for clients and maybe for a few designers is really the ‘dumbing down’ of graphic design as a profession: it does nothing to communicate the great importance that graphic design plays, past and present, in building global economies.
The real winners here are these websites like Vista Print, CrowdSpring, 99designs, etc., who are making money by treating graphic design as a cheap commodity. We are no more a cheap commodity than lawyers, plumbers, electricians and so on. And those who feed into it, because of desperation or whatever, are not helping themselves or the future of the design profession.
Here is some good news and a tip to all graphic designers: rethink your business model from a global to a local, more personalized specialty. A classmate and friend chose to pursue her artistic talents in cosmetic tattooing. She got the training, owns her business, and is free from globalization. Do something that can not be outsourced across the globe and done on a computer—Free yourselves from the rat-race, and be more creative.
I have been on many of these websites that endorse the spec work ethics. Unfortunately it does degrade the graphic design industry with the dishonesty on such a high level and lowers the value of our work by diluting the product demand. I have seen and witnessed stories on how peoples services have been ignored for not terminated their account on request, designers using other designers ideas on the post galleries simply by looking at their idea posted, the staff of these websites not following up or securing the money for the project to find a logo winner, many many more shady stories as well. If these websites have trophies to sucker designers into applying, then it is not worth it, clearly that is the only way to make any money on these websites if you actually get an award. The worst of it all is that some of the websites request your personal information like social security number for the 1099 form, god knows what they will do with that info.
If you take a close look at the winners it is usually the same designers, and the worst designs end up with winners on most occasions not even following direction at all. All-in-all life lesson learned for the most part. These websites more or less have their own underground community acting as designers to win contests for their own profit by stealing your ideas. Its a nasty business they are in and I hope they get caught. Please note these websites: crowdSring, Hatchwise, LogoMyWay, Logo Tournament, 99Designs, and many more. I have had one of these websites deny my registration because they saw that my work was professional. Having said that they can’t steal it or they could get sued big time so they denied me. These tight-nit communities are scams and should be exposed in a big way!
Designer beware… there are plenty of other opportunities to make money in design, and in an honesty professional way, not to mention getting paid for it too!
2 things about the article and the various comments:
The elitist attitude that school has anything to do with art is deplorable. If a client or if anybody finds the artwork suitable and attractive, what kind of a school the artist went to, if any, is beyond irrelevant.
The other thing is, like it or not, this way of doing things is here to stay. The reasons that we artists find to justify trying to set limits, are as futile as when skilled handlers of horse-drawn vehicles warned the world how foolish it was to depend on those automobiles.
There is a third thing, too. If the buyer and seller want to enter into a contract, it’s really none of anybody else’s business unless it something like selling their kidneys. If there are websites that facilitate the buyer and seller getting together, and they take a cut for their trouble, what’s wrong with that? Why should they work for free?
Wait. There’s more. I went to a screenwriting seminar once where the guy said “Never work on spec.” He was one of maybe 1% of professional writers who could get away with that. And even he must have worked on spec at some point, or else how did anybody ever know he could write at all?
Art just isn’t a field where people can be forced to pay for your work. It’s really one of the important things to understand about the art life.
I looked at your site and there’s a couple of paintings I want you to give me. I looked at their listed prices and that’s ridiculous. I shouldn’t be “forced to pay for your work”. Just give them to me. thanks.
Crowdsourcing your graphic design work. It’s bad for you. I have proof http://bit.ly/mDBxJH
I was excited when I started out on Freelancer and 99design. I WON $200! YAY ME!!! My winning design sat proudly at the top of the heap, with the gold ribbon. Winner! But my glory was short lived. Things began to get ugly real quick. “That is not a vector” they said. Actually it was, but in my desparation to get noticed, I photoshopped the image a little, adding some subtle lighting effects. Immediately I was sent an email from 99design, threatening to close my account if the design did not meet their standards. Nevermind that I had stayed up all night tweaking my design, now I had to spend the following day defending my work. OK, vectors, got it. So I enter more contests, I am on shortlist for 2 now. BUT, a CH flagged one of my designs (wrong colors), and now my account is suspended for failing to meet their “quality standard”. OK, so I put some junk out there, but what about my 4 and 5 star designs? “Removed for breaching code of conduct.” I am so mad right now I could scream. I can’t submit the designs to the contests I am shortlisted for (only 3 other designers on shortlist for one, and mine was the only one with 4 stars or more) because the account is suspended. Begging them to lift the suspension. Wish me luck….
I completely agree with this post. Crowdsourcing design websites are so bad for designers. It’s simply a way for clients to get something for virtually nothing. It’s a great way to lower the value of good art which goes against what artists stand for.