Category: Crowdsourcing

  • Donating the unpaid labor of others

    Steve Douglas wrote an in-depth piece about “the arrogance of crowdsourcing,” where he talks about the design contest for the Dallas Mavericks. He also reviews “unofficial” contests for Sony Playstation, Daft Punk, and Manchester United, where spec work websites “have nothing to lose — they’re donating the unpaid labor of others.” “It’s a copyright and…

  • Powerhouse Museum tries crowdsourcing for Sydney Design, then pulls contest

    “People are free to decide what they do with the efforts of designers of any stripe – that’s entirely ok. But when a publicly funded organisation (whose entire justification for their funding, and thus their existence, turns on promoting and championing design) chooses a crowdsourcing model, it’s incredibly disappointing to say the least.” Quoted from…

  • Obama crowdsourcing to support American jobs?

    A tweet from Niki Bivona (@nikibivona) on Twitter says it all: “RT @nospec http://my.barackobama.com/page/s/artworks-submission Obama is now crowdsourcing a poster, about job creation. Irony.” Obama, if you aim to support American jobs, then perhaps paying designers to create your campaign posters would be a good start.

  • US Department of Interior is crowdsourcing their logo?

    Here’s a petition found via Twitter that you might be interested in. @LogoMotives Petition: Stop the US Department of @Interior from Crowdsourcing a Logo | @nospec #nospec | http://bit.ly/NOSPEC-DOI “The U.S. Department of the Interior currently has posted a design brief on crowdspring.com (http://www.crowdspring.com/project/2296807_logo-us-department-of-the-interior/details/) asking for graphic designers to work for free in order to…

  • SXSW: Spec Work Is Evil, How Creatives Fight Back

    If you followed SXSW 2009 Is Spec Work Evil?, then you are sure to be interested in Andrew Hyde’s proposed panel for 2010: Spec Work Is Evil, How Creatives Fight Back. Description: The rise of community has also been met with the rise of the ‘weasel economics’ of spec work. Now that we have identified…

  • Crowdsink on Twitter: CrowdSpring, Do What’s Right!

    CrowdSpring sinks to even lower lows… This weekend, while Jay and I were busy updating no-spec.com, twitter continued to be all aflutter over the latest from CrowdSpring: CrowdSpring, Do What’s Right! Background: Seems a CrowdSpring designer ripped off the work of Mike Erickson of Logo Motive Design (LogomotiveMike on twitter). And while this is shocking…

  • Translators Against Crowdsourcing

    LinkedIn annoys professional translators Seems designers are not the only ones upset over being asked to work for free. LinkedIn – the professional networking site with 41 million members where relationships matter – has today managed to mightily annoy professional translators who use the site by asking them if they would like to translate the…

  • Comments on Spec Work and Crowdsourcing

    From the previous post, CreativePro: Spec Work and Crowdsourcing, I thought I’d grab a few of the opinions from the comments. Shale Grant said: Thanks for your constant and steadfast guard over working on spec. I’ve done both (have my own design firm and have submitted to Crowdspring and frankly no one’s forcing the designers…

  • The Logo Factor: Why you should crowdsource your logo

    If you’ve been keeping up with the comments on David Airey’s post, Forbes calls designers snooty, you couldn’t possibly have missed the excellent points made by Steve Douglas from The Logo Factory. Steve has long been on top of the spec issue with significant posts such as Logo Design Contest Copycats, Why logo contests don’t…

  • Forbes Says Designers are Snooty

    Two weeks ago, Christopher Steiner, a senior reporter with Forbes Magazine, sent me an email with FORBES MAGAZINE QUERY!!! in the subject line. After a back and forth with Christopher, interviews were set up with top designers in the industry. Busy designers, who agreed to take time out of their workload to talk via phone…