I know I’ve been bad. Two months! It’s been a pretty rough couple of a months. So much has happened and there’s so much still to do! Aside from some much needed isolation due to a family tragedy and exhaustion, I am going to be catching up on most of the stuff I would have posted about on here. It’s time to get back into routine and move on.
In the coming weeks:
Blog catchup
Building a new bike, we took some trips to the country, work has been eventful in a positive way, new shops, new restaurants. Great new goodies out there this summer too.
Portfolio launching All this laying-low has proven to be pretty productive. New portfolio and CV will be launching. They are looking great and Monika Piotrowicz has been doing a lot of the code for me. Mad props to her!
New Site launching I’ve decided to ditch my Dropular account, and I’ll be migrating the entire archive of my found pictures over to a new Tumblr which should be faster, more stable and a little more fun with all the commenting and reposting that can be had.
Just need a couple days to get all the stuff organized and I’ll be back on track here.
So I told my friend who works for Fantastic Man, that I would drop the sneak peak of the new The Gentlewoman cover here, but right before I did it, I saw it up at Selectism, so I got discouraged. Anyway, here it is, in all it’s glory, The Gentlewoman. New sister co-production to the amazing, trend setting Fantastic Man.
Issue one: When I get mine, I could do a hands on, but again, Selectism already did a hands on here, so I probably won’t. In Canada, American Apparel will likely be carrying it, but I’m sure some international magazine stores will stock it as well.
So I know George wears classics and classics are always in style, but I still think it’s a pretty awesome comparison. I threw it together this morning.
These simple one-liner posts are all I can spare while I try to ram out this damn portfolio!
Anyway, I usually hate these carbon copy outfit blog posts that you see all over Tumblr, but yeah this is pretty much me all week. Anticipating summer, I guess.
I know it appears as though I’ve been AFK, but the reality is that I’ve been real busy these days, and in the off-chance that I do sit down at the computer when I’m not at work, I’m working on the new portfolio and website. It’s all coming together, and I’m really excited to launch it and be fully dedicated to making fun new experimental work, and updating the journal here. Work is taking it’s toll, both my job and freelance – I’m having to stay late at work a lot because we’re launching the all-new eHarlequin.com in a week or so… In the meantime, I’m going to continue to be absent from the blog – I’m guessing for a couple more weeks. I’d like to start using this as a place to post interesting things I find online, and not just a photographic journal and rhetorical rant-line so once I reach that milestone, you’ll see some more interesting stuff on here for sure.
To be a total jerk and go back on what I just said, here’s a quick photo update of what I’ve been up to over the past few weeks.
Week of March 8th – Got some sort of Norwalk / Stomach Bug / Food Poisoning and had an all night vomit party. Yes! Spent the next week recovering. Luckily we gave Walter (the cat) back to Caitlin, and he wasn’t here to keep me up all night while I recovered from this awful blight.
Week of March 15th - Weather dramatically changes to warm, sunny and beautiful. I try to incorporate the word beautiful into my vocabulary only to find no one can take me seriously when I use that word. Go for a walk, grab a coffee, and run into Shannon on the street. We also decide to swap our bedroom with my office for a more ideal home configuration. I JUST set this office up, and now I have to take it all apart again. Eugh…
Week of March 22nd – We go to blue mountain to stay at Ian’s cottage with Alexis, Ian and a friend of his. It was the worst conditions I’ve ever experience on any mountain anywhere. There was blue sheet ice, white hard ice, and the groomed snow was like pebbles. I’m not just bitching because I’m used to skiing at west coast mountains like Whistler and Big White, but Ian actually said this was the worst he’s ever experienced at Blue Mountain and this is his hill! It was still none-the-less a great time and it was nice to just get away from the city for a while.
Over the past few weeks I’ve taken about 500 photos, and I’ll be uploading a photo a day to my Flickr account over the next few weeks to compensate for my lack of posting on here. Go there, and bookmark it, because I’ll be putting up photos from all of the stuff I mentioned above.
I’ll be back in a couple weeks!! Hopefully the next time I’m posting it’s to promote the newly launched site I’m working on.
This issue has been bothering me for a long time, and until recently I have been able to ignore the problem. But lately, I keep seeing more and more references to these websites and I feel like it’s my duty as a creative professional to write something about this problem.
99Designs and CrowdSpring are two of the more prominent new websites that promote the concept of “crowd sourcing” design work. Crowd Sourcing is the act of using a social media website to put out a general request for whatever it is that you need. Simplified, the crowd on the web is your source for everything you desire. 99Designs and Crowdspring, use a crowd sourcing platform to get people to pitch projects to a respective buyer. This completely made-up, and fictional example, should illustrate how the idea works:
Dynamic-X Solutions is a new startup business that specializes in building IT networks. They are a brand new company, and as such, do not have any branding or marketing collateral. They need to get their name out there, and they have decided that the first and foremost thing to do is to have a designer create their logo.
Dynamic-X Solutions could hire a designer, or a design agency, or a design studio, but because they have been told it’s more profitable to crowd-source the logo, they decide to register for an account at 99Designs.com. After creating their account, Dynamic-X Solutions puts out a contest at 99Designs that asks for a logo to represent the various policies and services that they would like be known for. 99Designs rules state that the contest is free and all the submissions are free. The contest garners a total of 350 logos submitted for free, but Dynamic-X Solutions must pick one in the end, and pay the respective designer a lump sum. Usually around 700 dollars. The other 349 logos are discarded and their designers are left with nothing other than a message that thanks them for their time.
Essentially, what this is, is spec work on a large scale. What is spec work? Spec work (short for speculative) is any job for which the client expects to see examples or a finished product before agreeing to pay a fee. Let’s put this into another context to see how ridiculous the idea really is.
A man walks into a sandwich shop, and he is unsure of what he wants. He tells the sandwich maker that he would like to taste all the 8 individual sandwiches that are on the menu, and when he has found a taste that he is satisfied with, he will purchase the sandwich that he likes the most. The sandwich maker scratches her head, and says that she can allow the man to taste her ingredients, but making all eight sandwiches, and only getting paid for one, is not a fair deal. The man then reassures the sandwich maker that he will not only buy the sandwich that he likes, but he will continue to buy these sandwiches in the future every-time he wants a sandwich. Again, the sandwich maker refuses the offer, because the ingredients will have to be thrown away after being put between bread and lathered with condiments. The potential customer then walks out the door, and goes to the next sandwich shop. He will continue doing this until he finds someone that will actually do it for him.
STOP DOING THIS.
99designs works by essentially soliciting finished spec work from its registered designers. You can’t just bid on a project. You have to actually do the project, submit it, and then pray. If you don’t “win,” well, you lose. The time and effort taking a shot into the dark is completely lost. Those “savvy clients” just got a shitty design, the winner got some shitty pittance for their effort, and all of the other shitty designers got jack shit for their shitty work. In a normal scenario, designers and design firms bid on projects that they are interested in doing. If their pitch goes well, the client hires them to do the full job. Many designers see bidding as bad enough already, because you are still doing something for free. But in the case of crowd-sourcing, you are actually doing the entire project for free with a high probability of the client being not interested in it.
Many defenders of these websites will say that this is like natural selection, and that this makes designers improve their skills quickly, to ensure that the client will buy their work. But sadly, this is not at all the case. Conversely, this is lowering the standard of living for designers everywhere. It is not honing their skills, but rather lowering their budget standards; it is teaching designers to undercut each other and to work for less than the status quo.
Who is crazy enough to submit work to 99Designs?
Unfortunately, many young designers from the third world, who do not have the industry environment to work in, use these websites to make quick money. To them, a logo for 750 dollars is a lot. But for the industry standard it is not. Recently, £12,000.00 (approx. 18,000 Canadian Dollars) was spent on the logo for the NHS 60th anniversary logo. Whether you think that is a gross overpayment or not is regardless and these these young designers could certainly be making better wages and a better living if they were not taken advantage of. 99Designs even specifically says on their website “we do it in a timely fashion without the usual risk or cost associated with professional design.” Without the cost of professional design? Great!!
Why is it bad for the designer?
Essentially what this has become is a simple, and tax-avoiding, method of outsourcing work to overseas labour. Certainly, by hiring someone at 99Designs for cheaper than normal will not yield the same quality as work done by a professional in your industry, but does it matter? Nope. Quality is not necessarily something that is noticed by executives, and that’s all fine and dandy, until you start limiting these young people to their own ignorance. They don’t know that they could be charging more for their work, but you do. This process is incredibly restraining to the overseas designer. Not only are they working hard for a low-chance of even getting paid, but they are not advancing themselves or gaining the experience necessary to become a career professional.
Why is it bad for the industry?
In these troubling economic times, we should be supporting our local businesses, and putting money back into our own economy. Business people should know this! But they don’t care. They don’t care that they are preventing new jobs for young people in their own location, and they don’t care that they are fueling economies where workers are grossly underpaid and have low standards of living.
Why is this bad for the client?
Not only is this process bad for the industry, and the designer, but it’s bad for the client. Instead of actually hiring a designer that understands your brand, your goals, your vision, how could it possibly benefit you to hire a complete stranger on the other side of the world who is ready to pump out 30 logos for free? No, we definitely do not want any long-term working relationships or any real investment in the single most important public-facing piece of design a company owns. We just want a fucking logo for $250.
If you’ve gotten this far, I applaud you for being interested and/or in agreement. If you do not agree with this, suit yourself, but rest assured you will never work with me.
Some other good reads on the subject can be found at these links:
1. Much of my rant is based on this one, which can be found here. It also has a good breakdown of how the numbers don’t add up.
2. About.com usually sucks, but this article is simple and concise. It gives a brief explanation of spec work, and why it’s a bad standard.
3. This problem has become so out of hand, that an anti-spec union has formed. View it here.
Lastly, a couple great videos of the same scenario in different contexts can be viewed below.
My friend Marc recently directed and edited the video for Tegan and Sara’s Alligator. He was anxious the week before when I saw him, and afterwords he said they managed to successfully shoot the whole production in a single weekend. Kudos, Marc!
