crowdSPRING is a competition for graphic designers and the winner of the competition gets paid. Is this a good idea?
CrowdSPRING is a website where graphic designs, logos, and website designs are put out for bid, creating an open competition among interested designers. Registered designers post designs for the buyer’s consideration and the buyer picks a winner of the design competition. This is commonly called “spec work” in the design world. Spec (speculative) work is done at no charge to the client in hopes that the client will buy the product or the finished design.
I think the jury is still out on the effectiveness of this system. There are negatives and positives. If you are a professional graphic designer that stays busy, this type of design selling does not impact you much. But if you are a freelancer who is out looking for design work, you now have either new competition or a new place to sell your services.
No expertise is required to compete at crowdSPRING. Anyone can create a logo, post it, and become part of the competition. This is good for people who want to gain experience or get their foot in the door of the design business. But it is not good for professional designers who have spent years building up their design skills, client skills, and general business skills. Such professionals now have competitors with possibly no experience on an equal playing field.
I do not think that most professional designers are going to compete in this kind of situation unless the fees get substantially higher. The chance of winning needs to be worth the risk of the time invested. There are projects that bid as low as $200, which is not a high rate for a professional creating a completed design (and a poor rate for the completion of a website design).
The financial issues boil down to how much money you can charge for a design and how much clients are willing to pay for design services. I think the question many designers have is, “Does this kind of crowd approach to design lower the value of quality design?” In other words, is crowdSPRING lowering the value of design in the minds of perspective clients?
CrowdSPRING may make some designers more competitive, leading them to work harder. It also mingles inexperienced designers with experienced designers. You can often pick out the experienced designers from the inexperienced. CrowdSPRING becomes a gallery of various capability and experience levels working on the same problem, which is why I think it is an interesting forum.
My perspective as an experienced designer is that I sell much more than a finished design. I sell a level of competence, a level of experience, and knowledge of a client’s business. These attributes are beyond what I could provide in a CrowdSPRING environment. I build ongoing relationships with my clients. In a crowdSPRING world, when a logo project is finished and the winner is awarded, the client-designer relationship is usually over. The relationship could potentially continue, but that is not the general concept of how crowdSPRING works. CrowdSPRING does not focus on building client-designer relationships. Relationships and support matter in the day-to-day world of graphic design.
CrowdSPRING is simply a set of hired hands. The downside is that a lot of those hired hands are not being paid. In my opinion, this system will ultimately fail based on its current structure because the crowd will not always be willing to continue competing with no reward. The site will either be overwhelmed with too large of a crowd, so that the chance of being awarded the winning design becomes very difficult, or the crowd will get so small that no clients will be interested in the few low quality designers competing. CrowdSPRING seems to require a near perfect balance between the amount the client is willing to pay and the size and interest of the crowd. Ultimately, this does not seem like a long-term business strategy.
What it comes down to is that you get what you pay for. If you pay for hired hands to create a one-time design, then crowdSPRING fills that request. You can also get something like that from E-Lance.com and many other sources. If you want to have a professional ongoing relationship with a graphic design expert, you are going to get a lot more for your dollar.
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