At LogoinnTM we strongly believe in creativity, professionalism, and high quality service. We support the No-Spec! Cause, and we would love to do anything to create awareness among small businesses about what they should and what they should not crowdsource.
Let’s first understand what Crowdsourcing is:
Wikipedia defines crowdsourcing as:
“Crowdsourcing is a neologistic portmanteau of “crowd” and “outsourcing” for the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call.”
We won’t go out of the way to blame crowdsourcing as an evil practice altogether. In fact, it has proved itself to be very useful in different kind of jobs. For example large amounts of data can be crowdsourced to people for processing, error checking, or entering into databases. One job can be divided into many parts and can be outsourced to many people around the globe.
Another good example of crowdsourcing is that an algorithm or any other kind of mathematical or scientific problem can be crowdsourced to people to work at and come up with many different solutions.
The good part for project organizers is that they do not pay everyone working on the project and even that payment is usually very nominal.
However, crowdsourcing for businesses is an altogether different practice and its ethical and moral issues are the cause of heated debate among those in favor and those who oppose this practice calling it an evil wicked way to save costs.
At logoinn, our major concerns are the design jobs. Since we are mainly a logo design business offering our services to medium and small sized businesses, these crowdsourced design jobs affect our business directly. We do not mind competition; in fact we are very good at what we do.
So this is what happens at these so called crowdsourcing portals or design contests. Businesses and organizations post a design job on these portals. Specifying their needs and setting a price for it. The job seekers on these portals can then design that logo and submit it to the job poster. Usually there are many people submitting their work for each job and the job poster only pays to the one that they like the best.
Now for a moment, think of yourself as a graphic designer looking for work on these portals. Would you be able to survive on this income, where you work without any guarantee that you will get paid for the work you are doing? Usually the graphic designers there then submit their work to as many jobs as possible. Sometimes several designs a day.
Now you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to guess the quality standard of these works. These designs are copied from other logo designs most of the time. The designers simply do not have the time to research and come up with a unique idea in this short period of time.
They use stock photos in their designs and sometimes they do not have the rights to use these stock photos or clipart in the trademark or business logo.
If something goes wrong it is not possible to you the job poster to go back and catch that designer and ask him to pay for the damages or fix the things that they messed up.
There are many other issues with crowdsourcing design jobs. Such as the language barrier, most designers on these sites are from developing countries in Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe. English is not their first language, and in most cases it is not even their second language. If you are lucky and you found someone who can understand you easily there are other problems associated with the distance.
One of the main problems with the distance is that these people do not understand the culture, environment, business values and other such issues associated with your targeted market and audiences. It is not easy for them to come up with an idea that is as inspiring to Americans as it is to Indians or Chinese. Some font and colors could be considered trendy in these regions and obsolete in North America and Europe.
One of our staff member once described these design contest portals, and crowdsourcing marketplaces as “modern day plantations”. The prize for these designs $100 USD may not be significant to designers in the US. But it is a very good price for designers in India and China. Isn’t this evil to take advantage of under privileged to do our jobs at nominal rates?
