Crowdsourcing is and has been a hot topic in the design industry over the last year or two, and while I've touched on it a little in "Creation of a Logo" and my comments on a couple blogs I feel it's worthy of its own post.
Wikipedia says crowdsourcing is "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." As I have no experience for how it affects other industries, the focus will be on design.
Why It's Bad For Companies:
Companies are turning to crowdsourcing for all kinds of design, not just logos. I've seen posts up for websites, letterhead, brochures, envelopes, posters, you name it and it's been crowdsourced. At first thought the idea of crowdsourcing seems like a great move for a company because there's this illusion that everyone who crowdsources gets an amazing result for cheap.
Not true, and here's why.
There are many phases in the design process that heavily depend on conversation with the client. In fact, nearly EVERY phase in the design process heavily depends on that conversation. The first stage is research, in which the designer looks into the company's background to get a feel for where their current designs are now and how they can evolve into something better. In addition, they talk with the client to get a feel for how the company runs. This step ensures the initial design directions "feel" like the company "feels." It makes sure the design directions already gel with the brand. Without this conversation (which crowdsourcing prevents), especially if the company doesn't have a website, the very first step in the design process is significantly gimped.
The next phase in the design process, which we call ideation, is where designers come up with a wide range of solutions (some of them ridiculous, others not), and then trim them down and present them to the client for input. These ideation solutions are the other part of the foundation of the design along with the initial research. This phase is completely removed by crowdsourcing because there's no way to present those ideas.
So if your end design is a building and a minimum of half the foundation is missing or weak, how great is the result going to be?
After research and ideation the designer comes up with rough sketches for the actual designs. Each of those sketches presents a different possible design direction based on the previous two steps, which ensures that at this point any of the possibilities will already work with the company's identity (though of course some will be better than others). This gives the company multiple avenues and another chance to give input to the designer before a final direction is chosen to pursue. Crowdsourcing removes this step as well.
Crowdsourcing skips those first three steps and goes straight to the fourth, which is typically reserved for revisions and polish to a direction that has already been seen and revised by the company multiple times. So now, instead of having one design that really matches with the company brand, they have anywhere from fifteen to a couple hundred designs that are essentially step two designs that have no basis on step one and the company is forced to choose from them (in order to protect designers, after a certain number of entries are made the company is under contractual obligation to pay for one).
Step five, final output, consists of the last small changes made to a design before it's complete. Because crowdsourcing does typically allow some conversation between designer and client step five is usually the same.
On top of all this, the majority of crowdsource using designers are students. I'm not saying students all do bad work, but I am saying most of the designs you see (and must choose from!) are not done by graphic design professionals. I cannot decide what that's worth to you.
So, as a company, which is better to end up with? A design that was created based on a brief and maybe a website, or a design that was created based on thorough research, conversation, constant input, multiple revisions, and has a refined output? Which do you think will say more about your company?
Why It's Bad For Designers:
This is a much simpler argument than why it's bad for companies, and it comes down to one main point. Designers need to be paid for the work they do.
When you crowdsource you are asking potentially hundreds of people to work for you for free in the hopes they'll get paid. Does that sound ethical? Every time you crowdsource multiple people aren't getting paid for the work they do for you. Would that happen in your offices?
Now to this a lot of companies say, "Well the designers are choosing to participate. They're choosing to take that risk." This is fair, but is extremely short sighted. Thousands, perhaps even millions of projects have already been done on crowdsourcing sites. How long before designers no longer have a choice if they want work? Crowdsourcing sites are growing every day.
In addition, even those designers who do win are typically significantly underpaid, but because most of them are students are completely unaware. If the norm for a logo award payment is $300 that seems like a lot to a student. The average fast logo design takes 22 hours of work, broken down that's about $14/hour. That doesn't seem terrible for a student until you remember it's an independent contract which means the student needs to pay social security tax, medicare tax, and self-employment tax out of those $14. Suddenly they're down to $8/hour even though at this point they already have the expertise to be earning more than that.
So now you've got three guaranteed outcomes from crowdsourcing:
1. A design that doesn't match your brand as well as if you'd gone with an agency or freelancer.
2. Designers who worked hard for you for absolutely nothing.
3. A designer who was probably underpaid.
Not worth it.
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