Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Crowd

A group of determined people can accomplish great feats together, but lets draw a line in the sand between collaboration or harnessing collective understanding, and exploitation.

Recent attempts to create so-called crowd-sourced visual design are nothing short of unethical; degrade the work that is produced, and create an abundance of visual trash.

Does anyone Who will get paid for their recipe on crowdspring.com?

AIGA, the professional association for design, encouraged its members to avoid contests and spec work, long before the internet made such practices commonplace. They assert:

Clients risk compromised quality as little time, energy and thought can go into speculative work, which precludes the most important element of most design projects—the research, thoughtful consideration of alternatives, and development and testing of prototype designs.

Designers risk being taken advantage of as some clients may see this as a way to get free work; it also diminishes the true economic value of the contribution designers make toward client’s objectives.

There are legal risks for both parties should aspects of intellectual property, trademark and trade-dress infringements become a factor.

Rafe Needleman called this weasel economics in a 2008 cnet.com article. Designer Andrew Hyde clearly articulates the unique nature of visual design and why seemingly similar creative producers (like T-shirt maker threadless.com) are actually quite different in his post, Spec Work Is Evil / Why I Hate Crowdspring.

I'm sure business models will continue to emerge that exploit the masses for short-term gain. Hopefully businesses that instead place true value in the crowds they attract, find greater success.