The irony of 99designs is that its customers are actually paying to use their own design intuition! All they benefit from is the contestant’s Illustrator (or Photoshop or MS Paint) abilities.
If they actually valued design, they would pay a designer to deliver to them a solution he believed was correct, rather than choose from an assortment of shapes and colours based on their own ideas about design.
The result, of course, of a typical 99designs competition is complete crap. Not designed, but rather one of the pieces of shit thrown at a wall that stuck. And that’s all the economics of the competition can support; what real designer can actually take time to create an effective design solution when the potential prize is less than a couple hour’s work on a far-less-risky contracting job?
But I don’t advise people against using 99designs as long as they know what they’re buying. They’re buying their pick off the rails in T.K. Maxx. They’re buying their choice of sandwich filling in Centra. They’re buying LASIK@home. They’re buying a half-hour off a cheap hooker. They are not buying design.
32 Comments
It’s a problem occurring not only in webdesign… People want good quality stuff, and they want it as fast as possible AND as cheap as possible. The result is a cheap and crappy solution. I see it everywhere, people renting a cheap house but expecting a castle, even car fixes are done by “someone they know”. It’s sad to see that everything is evolving that way.
To quote my grandfather “They don’t make things the way they used to”, but mostly the motivation for “boxed solutions” is the lack of knowledge and money.
Posted by joggink at 10:04 am on 15 December, 2009.
I agree.
Posted by em_Y at 12:22 pm on 15 December, 2009.
How do you know what a cheap hooker costs?
Al
Posted by Alan at 1:24 pm on 15 December, 2009.
Must one have Adobe skills to be an aesthete? Does the lack thereof mean a owner/founder/entrepreneur passes up the right to apply ‘intuition’ about how their own company should be visually represented?
Designers are generally hired guns. Smart and talented of course, but also non-stakeholding, probably poorly-briefed, and ultimately anonymous. Would one ever take such an individual’s contribution verbatim and without question?
(By the way, it costs a lot to remove each of those adjectives)
Yes of course, 99Designs does contain a bell curve of rubbish. So does the web as a whole.
But it does allow those who care about their endeavors (and who may just have an opinion of their own) access to a meritocratic marketplace in a very cost-effective way. For many, this is more appealing than than at point blank from an expensive, perhaps intimidating, single source.
From realty to auctions, car sales to logo design, disintermediation and commoditisation are the sorts of things the Internet does rather well.
(And I think that the potential costs to this approach - e.g. less hand-crafted attention & personal service - are well understood and tolerated)
Of course it can threaten those it disrupts, but on the whole I applaud it
Posted by James Pearce at 2:08 pm on 15 December, 2009.
I’ve been preaching this as a flaw of crowdSPRING and 99 Designs for a while.
Basically, a “client” is replacing the most valuable member of the design team: the creative director. This is the person with the most experience, and the client is now assuming that role. In any other industry, that would be disastrous, potentially fatal, or just plain stupid.
And the work process? Definitely more than a couple of hours in investment. The “client” comes back with changes or poor direction. Easily adds up to days of work.
Posted by Sharlene at 3:17 pm on 15 December, 2009.
I kind of find it entertaining to say the least, looking at frustrated “clients” reviewing their crap entries and making demands.
I love this one:
http://99designs.com/contests/33505
Because the “client” is like this “logo” needs to look “affluent” and “old money” — HAH! Good luck sir.
Posted by sherri at 4:21 pm on 15 December, 2009.
Designers have to educate people on the value of good design - that’s the fundamental problem. It’s too easy to think that there’s little difference between a very average design and an exceptional one. Until people value good design - and see tangible rewards for it, sites like 99designs and Crowdspring will continue to exist.
Posted by Joshua Karp at 4:45 pm on 15 December, 2009.
Extremely well made point Eoghan. We just have to let these customers willing to accept awful stock designs take them away and ruin their brand and business. That is the only way they will learn.
Posted by Darren Alawi at 4:48 pm on 15 December, 2009.
Great post. I completely agree with this - you get what you pay for. There’s always clients out there who know what they want in a web design and don’t listen to good reason, so it’s possibly good that 99 designs exists for them.
Posted by Adam at 4:54 pm on 15 December, 2009.
I buy my socks in T.K.Maxx AND have used Contrast. I feel tainted now, I must be an edge case….
Posted by keith bohanna at 5:35 pm on 15 December, 2009.
I’ll take the contrarian view that a crowdsourced site such as 99designs might not be what you consider some pure form of “design”, but in terms of getting a basic idea off the ground I think it’s hard to beat.
I’m a coder with a background in art, but if I’m trying to get a project up and running my time is best spent writing code, not tweaking a design. In the spirit of JFDI*, getting something that’s “good enough” out the door beats the amazing design that takes a year to tweak and never sees the light of day every time. The one essential raw resource I have is time - There are only so many hours in the day that I can work on my idea while holding down a full-time job, it’s a matter of trading a small amount of money for time that I can spend in more effective ways.
I gave the crowd a basic wireframe, a breakdown of the user persona that would be using the site, a list of essential elements required for the page, and some general guidelines. I gave a lot of feedback. What I received in return may not win design awards, but it will result in a clean, usable site. The economics of it are clear - using my money on a design (or any other service) has to add value above and beyond what I could do myself in the time it would take me.
Why use crowdsourcing at all? I asked three designers whose work I admire whether they’d be interested in the project, and asked them to quote me. They were either too busy, or expensive to a point that I could just do it myself for roughly the same time/cost trade-off.
* = http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/19/what-makes-an-entrepreneur-four-lettersjfdi/
Posted by Dave Concannon at 7:09 pm on 15 December, 2009.
Most of my projects, at their start, have no brand, no image, an undetermined market, and no known chance of commercial success. For the effort and cost it is crap but better than the crap I can put together myself while I should be doing other things and what I can afford while bootstrapping. To me your argument, however valid, is orthogonal to my problems. And I’m not going to stoop to ask for things with payment maybe in the future like this: http://www.27bslash6.com/p2p.html. The designers of the sites you don’t like could at know what they’re getting into as do the customers.
Posted by Paul at 7:18 pm on 15 December, 2009.
We got our logo from 99 Designs but had to work for it. The winner came in at the last minute, and I still needed by own deign skills to adopt it a little. For getting inspiration it was great, fantastic! But it came with a whole lot of shite.
http://99designs.com/contests/15489
Posted by Robin Blandford at 8:20 pm on 15 December, 2009.
Did you actually read what you wrote? Do you think you are making a compelling and logical argument here?
So you imply only good designers have design intuition and no good designer ever participates in a design competition. And if you value design and are not a designer, you should realise that you have no design intuition whatsoever, and use the little common sense you have left to pay a single good designer to save you from your own aesthetics disability?
Crap!
Posted by Roché Compaan at 9:14 pm on 15 December, 2009.
Between both James Pearce and Dave Concannon’s eloquent replies my thoughts on 99designs have been voiced.
Posted by Barry Cogan at 9:22 pm on 15 December, 2009.
James: To answer your two first questions: no and no. I agree with you wholeheartedly. And certainly I admire the business—I would be very proud be be behind 99designs. My point is—and it seems you agree with me here—that despite their name, they do not sell design. So, if their customer is a Robin Blandford (i.e. someone with natural design sense), that customer will do well. But what of the other guys? I’ve seen a lot of otherwise smart individuals employ their design “intuition” to disastrous results.
Posted by Eoghan McCabe at 11:12 pm on 15 December, 2009.
I won’t state my views on any business models here but I would like to say I share some of the authors sentiments regarding 99designs and don’t support spec-work, personally. Being a logo designer who’s always looking out for the client, I find it almost a full time job monitoring the crowd sourcing sites looking for logos that have been ripped from my portfolio. What is disheartening is when I can’t ‘catch’ the the crooks. It’s usually much too late for the business who has chosen a design that they assumed was original, and have gone on to implement the logo onto signage, web sites, car decals, etc… I don’t enjoy writing the dreaded email to inform them that the design is already in use by one of my clients and they must ‘do it all over’. This type of thing is common as it’s happened to me a handful of times, as well as other designers I know.
Posted by Raja Sandhu at 1:46 am on 17 December, 2009.
i hired a designer to make me a logo. i found out five years later that someone else had the same logo. so i went to logomyway and did a design contest and chose a terrific logo from more than 100 options.
i hired a designer to redesign my website and the design was terrrible. money down the drain. and now i am going to 99designs to do a contest so i can have some choice.
i understand why designers hate these sites. but for the consumer, the real benefit is having choices. my two efforts to hire designers cost me a lot of money and left me
locked in to just a handful of choices. at least the contest sites give us more options.
sure there is a lot of cheap clipart “design” that is submitted, but in my experience there
are also some gems.
Posted by ed at 4:17 pm on 21 December, 2009.
I’ve been writing and researching spec work companies for a year and a half now. Thanks for this fantastic post, straight to the point.
Posted by Andrew Hyde at 1:34 am on 23 December, 2009.
There is certainly a market out there for places like 99designs. Afterall, that is why its alive and well.
The big problem with these sites, in general, is that they encourage an attitude that the “client” can get something quality + cheap + fast. Sorry, this just isn’t going to happening. Not in this dimension anyways.
While there are definitely people that understand the issues design competitions create, and where they are useful (getting a fast/low quality prototype), most people don’t get it. Don’t agree with me? Why don’t you go take a look at some of the submissions and client feedback of the competitions.
You’ll see that the majority have a client playing Creative Director, giving vague, poorly articulated and uneducated feedback.
The problem starts with the client. Most clients do not know how to write a creative brief. Most don’t even know what sort of information about their business should be provided.
This is the job of a skilled designer or creative director. A client should be taken through a strategic process to determine the right design direction.
However, the very first step in the ladder is missing completely. This then produces more crap downstream as “designers” pump out concepts based on information that has little more substance than pocket lint.
Then to make matters worse, you have clients giving poor feedback and change requests on concepts that were not effective or appropriate to begin with, based on a non-existent creative brief. Crap multiplied by 3.
Design competitions remove the real benefit of working with a designer: strategic and creative concept development that is VERY specific to your business needs. Collaboration. Relying and utilizing the designers skill and experience.
On the other hand, if you are comparing this to hiring an individual designer to take care of the job for the same price as the competition reward… more than likely you are commissioning someone without the skill and experience I am referring to. In that case, run a competition. You aren’t going to get an effective brand identity for $200 from anyone, crowd sourced or not.
I heard the word “intuition” mentioned here. It has nothing to do with intuition. Good design takes real skill and experience, not some magical intuition you acquire at birth.
Posted by Danny Halarewich at 11:08 am on 27 December, 2009.
I think Danny Halarewich re-articulated the point of the blog entry. What is design? The shapes in Illustrator? No, dude, all the service, the consulting crap. At 99d’ you only get the art, not the design. So the client has to be the designer and that is funny in an ironic way as the blog points out.
Posted by Christopher at 3:23 pm on 1 January, 2010.
hmm i kind of agree
its so sad that there is another website doing something same
http://www.contestdesigns.com
oh well maybe its the change in the design world
not going to support them in my own opinion
Posted by grant tailor at 3:43 am on 6 January, 2010.
I have to agree with the OP, especially after seeing some of the examples. There is a lot of junk in there, which is to be expected when asking 100 designers to create mockups - like they do for 10-15 other contests every day. That’s not only a huge resource waste right there, but no good can come out of this. The amount of time the designer can afford to every single job is extremely low, considering there is no money for 98 of the participants. Plus, as was stated before, the customer becomes the creative director. Which is fine as long as he actually is a creative director, and even then having to pick from bad or worse is not a great proposition. Most clients require in-depth, intensive consulting to make their brand succeed though, and that is what designers are actually for. Or should be. *Some* agencies treat their customers like creative directors, too…
Posted by Berthold at 9:52 am on 11 January, 2010.
Just with counterfeit products, I believe it’s less severe if the buyer knows that they’re buying a counterfeit — so that when the inferiority of the product starts to surface, that doesn’t dent the brand image of the faked product’s authentic maker.
…with professional graphic designers, still, I think the client’s role is overrated. The client should have as little say as a ‘doctor + patient’ relationship — state your problem and let the designer offer the best suitable solutions under the circumstance [client goal, budget, deadline etc.]
Posted by Mokokoma Mokhonoana at 7:45 am on 19 January, 2010.
What a bunch of whiny baby prima donnas are those who can’t adapt.
The whole world is becoming commoditized thanks to the web, why not art?
I have been a designer for 30+ years and I think 99designs is great fun and
good practice. There are some very talented people there and good solid creative design wins many times. Many times the client hasn’t got a clue, but that is true with real live clients too! I have seen major brand names that would have never strayed from their NY ad agency 5 years ago posting high level contests and getting great results too. Change happens, adapt or choose to be a purist left in the dust. I am old enough to remember the market comps and rapidograph renderings of camera ready art, the computer made life easier and also made “designers” out of way too many people. Back then there were those purists that said it was not art unless it was done with your hand. I think most of them ended up retiring early and finding other things to do with their hands.
Posted by Frank Motola at 1:58 am on 13 February, 2010.
marker comps not market!
Posted by Frank Motola at 1:59 am on 13 February, 2010.
do your own business 99 is a great idea and great contest!
Posted by artcandy at 2:06 am on 13 February, 2010.
I do work for a handful of high-end clients. It’s nice, thought the work can sometimes be slow coming in, and getting to completion. I also make money off 99Designs. It pays my monthly mortgage, and some other bills.
But, I will never tell anyone that I do this, unless completely anonymous. It’s just not respectable. I’m a traditional graphic designer, and I should not have to do this. But the truth is, I do.
Are you going to tell me it’s better I don’t participate and starve, then make a quick $300 bucks on a logo some idiot with no design sense picks as a winner? Some months, I can clear the house on the site, Other months, I busy with some of my more “respectful” work. But the truth is, at the end of the day, I need to eat, my family needs heat, and I have bills. I don’t like it, but someone with just a bit of design sensability can really have a good run on a site with 99Designs. But you didn’t hear it from me.
Posted by The fake Paul Rand at 6:04 am on 13 February, 2010.
do cocaine dealers lament the explosion of crystal meth?
true graphic design is NOT the same product as whats available everywhere online.
the internet makes EVERYONE WITH A BLOG ACCOUNT IN THE WORLD a potential client - they’d have to wait YEARS in line at the Graphic Design Dept.™ just to meet with ‘true’ designers… if they dont want cake, let them eat crumbs…
cake-makers should not be threatened buy people baking their own breads at home.
online design is supposed to be cheap… when “clients” get tired of the look of their cheaply made design they will choose a higher tier of talent to help increase the value of their brand. ‘true designers’ your time will come… you’ll have us ‘cheap designers’ to thank for that.
you’re welcome!
Posted by ron davis at 8:36 am on 13 February, 2010.
When it comes to brand, so much more goes into brand building and brand experience - to say that a graphic designer is creating a brand is misleading. Witness the huge success of very inferior graphic designs attached to wonderful brands. The brand is a combination of so many factors that the market then attaches to the mental real estate of the image that has been associated with the brand. As designers we love to make that in tune with the brand, but the honest truth is there are a whole lot of more important factors. Like customer experience perhaps?
Posted by Frank Motola at 12:52 pm on 13 February, 2010.
@Frank - Adapt to commoditized “drive-thru” design or be left in the dust? Please.
Your forecast that the design and marketing service industry is going to significantly change because of competition sites is seriously lacking. Since fast food was invented, do people in general no longer value or pay for quality meals from a nice restaurant? No? Because that is basically what you are saying here.
You then go on to get confused by your own statements in your second comment. You’re right, branding is about way more than just a logo (in the case of 99designs it would be based on non-existent brief with no research). While it’s much more than a logo, it’s also much more than customer service. In addition to business strategy, copywriting and naming, there is also visual identity. Developing an effective visual identity can’t be done through a competition. And if someone is not willing to invest anything into doing it right, then it shows they aren’t willing to let their business to succeed.
If you enjoy working with clients who aren’t willing to succeed, well, that’s your own business. But I’m quite happy working with serious clients who value quality work. I also enjoy the company of motivated, confident individuals. And I know those sort of clients will always be around.
Posted by Danny Halarewich at 3:07 am on 25 February, 2010.
99designs resumed? People work to design something original, people post it, other people come, copy it, paste it, win it. Simple.
Sites like those tear down all the passion formation and knowledge a designer has towards his/her area.
Posted by Dan at 10:31 pm on 25 February, 2010.
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[...] the actual quality of the work gets a lot less attention. This is a point that Eoghan raised on the Contrast blog, in a really interesting post. In Eoghan’s own words, what you get a lot of the time is [...]
Posted by Is crowdsourcing really worth it? at 3:11 pm on 1 January, 2010