Design and Crowdsourcing

I am going to be turning 30 in a few months. I only mention this as a point of reference, you see I got my first art/drawing program for a computer when I was 4. My first copy of adobe photoshop (3.0 in case you are curious) came around when I was 13. I designed my own wallpaper, tweaked photos, played with effects etc. for several years and then designed my first website with it when I was 17. So when I was in college an opportunity arose to do an internship with a magazine designing full color high resolution ads using photoshop. They were looking for someone who was skilled with photoshop and would work for next to nothing. By then we were using photoshop 7.0, and it was a very exciting opportunity for me.

So of course I did it. Turned out to be the best and worst job I ever had. It was so awesome to see your own work in print especially when I got to design full page ads with beautiful photographs. Of course sometimes it was infuriating, frustrating, pull your hair out, eat your time up till you have none and no money to show for it kind of work.

For example occasionally we had to beg clients to send us their material for their ads and when they did, it would be utterly unusable garbage. Then we would beg some more. Occasionally after all that the client would insist we use what they sent us because it worked perfectly well for "such in such" publication.

What do you do when you have unusable source material for photoshop, and they actually want real photos in their work. There are several options:

1. render something that looks kind of like what they are looking for.

2. Use a stock photo of a similar item.

3. Make an ad for them using their low resolution poorly scanned/printed photos and then compare that ad to one we made for another client... one who perhaps had allowed us to do a photo shoot (at no extra charge) for them to show off their store/product/food/service etc.

In case you are wondering we usually picked option number 3. Option number 3 entailed someone doing the best they possibly could to make a nice design, that they knew would not likely come out very good, and would most likely not get used. Who might you pick for such a frustrating job... how about your low-paid intern who is there seventy hours a week... I always took it as a challenge... "Well I can make this look good... just wait... you won't be scheduling that photo shoot after all!"

I changed my tune on this when a client decided to email us scanned images from a previous print ad in very low resolution. They were tiny for web images and you could still see the dots from its previous printing...

But that wasn't even close to the most frustrating thing we had to deal with. For the first couple weeks of our working month we would sit for hours with nothing to do. We filled this time learning new photoshop techniques, downloading new fonts, doing yoga, adjusting our massive back-stock of images we hadn't used, and going for long lunches. Later in the month when we got within about 10 days of our "send off to print" day, suddenly we would be slammed with 10 hours of work a day. All the clients we had been begging for material for weeks suddenly decided they had time to send it to us, or risk losing the money they spent on a placer ad or a previously run ad.

That's when all of a sudden you had an extra couple hours of work to do because... "I like this photo because my hair is hanging this way, but not this other one, but I like her smile in that one is their some way you could merge the two?" or "We decided not to use the hand model because the owner wanted to have her own hand in the shot but now she thinks her hand looks too old... I told her you could just "photo-shop-it."

Really? I get to do at least an extra hour of boring monotonous work in spite of the fact that the model was present all because the "owner" wanted to stroke her own ego by having her own hand in the shot... and is too vain to let us use it as is... really?!

And then there was the fact that occasionally our boss would come in, lean over our shoulder, and start "tweaking" our design for us... move the text that way... now make it yellow instead...

We always changed it back when he did that but he often managed to waste an hour of our time pretending like he had some editorial control in the design... which he didn't (we had an editor-in-chief, and a managing editor who filled those roles just fine and never felt the need to back seat drive our designs... the "boss" was the owner). Occasionally we had to let him feel like he was in charge, but generally he was focused on buying new bathroom fixtures for the office and eating lunch with prominent clients etc.

Our "boss" was continuously getting us into trouble by making stupid promises to clients. Once he told a client who was advertising a cookbook with us that we were "renovating our kitchen at the office" and when it was done we would cook one of their recipes, and do a photo shoot of it in our beautiful, newly renovated kitchen.

The problem was that our "kitchen" was a fridge, counter, and sink squeezed into what looked like a closet with shop lights over it and bland grey office-style carpet... in other words a very sparse break room that didn't even have chairs. The other problem: we weren't renovating it.

So when this gigantic lie got exposed, we were asked to go home and cook one of the more photogenic dishes in the book. This of course was right in the middle of print week, when we were all there from 7am to 9pm every day. I said "no" along with everyone else. So the "boss" decided he would do a photo shoot of a microwave pot pie... really... a microwave pot pie broken up and put in a nice bowl.

When our editor-in-chief saw the photos he called up the client, explained the situation, and profusely apologized. I think they ultimately got their ad for free that month.

The real frustration came when you spent hours designing an amazing, beautiful, breath-taking ad that you knew would win you amazing awards if people could just see it... and the client didn't like it.

Obviously this is pretty common and to be expected in the design universe. Sometimes your vision, and the clients wants/needs just do not match up. We honestly did not take it personally... except when they decided to "fix" the problem by suggesting a few revisions.

That is when the hair ripping starts occurring.

Imagine for example that you are making a full page ad for a upscale salon who never provides any photos and asks for a valentine's day ad. So you make a beautiful ad with a rose watermark and a stark red/black divide down the page. The black was to heighten the contrast of the red which is where the rose blooms were concentrated.

But, oops you forgot that the client is sitting right next to a university whose colors are red and black, and they did not see your ad as "valentine's themed" but university-color-themed. Ouch. No harm... we'll scrap that ad and try something else... but no... instead... the client says... well it would be fine if you just changed the colors... I like lilac and sage.

I protested... I fought... I argued... I still ended up with an atrociously ugly full page ad that I get credit for designing. The client approved it when all was said and done... lilac over rose blooms that you can barely see with a green so soft no real contrast was possible... no sense of valentines... nothing that said anything about the store... and on top of that the only color that worked on top of all of that for the font was yellow... It was so ugly.

I insisted on designing a different ad the following month, and the client did not protest. I asked her later why she approved the previous ad. She said the only thing she liked about it was "the color," but she was too busy to worry about revisions.

So sometimes a client tweaking a design here or there is fabulous. If all we have to do is change a font and it is perfect that would save us hours of work. On the other hand sometimes a little tweaking leads to designers disowning the work, sometimes even refusing to do it.

What was nice was that you were a part of a design team, and while we didn't do every design as a team, often the work was making small revisions to previous ads that others had done.

We would get instructions like "take this ad from last month and drop this photo into it." Move the text if necessary to make it fit.

Of course the original designer was always welcome to take the work but usually they were happy to hand off that kind of work to someone else so that they could work on new designs.

What was nice about this? Sometimes you effectively did a whole new design in a matter of minutes, especially if the ad was mostly photograph. You didn't have to spend hours "cleaning-up their logo," entering all their info again, building new graphics, or even rebuilding a previous design or logo. Basically all the grunt work was already done. You only had to color adjust the photos, reposition/resize them, move the logo and text to a sensible position... and wa-la.

Since we had a tight-knit design team this was never a problem. Everyone benefited from everyone else's work when it was done well. Likewise if you made a mess or edited a photo wrong (as I accidentally did once in my first week), then a small revision can turn into completely redoing an ad. (I got called at home at around 10pm with "what did you do to this image file?!" oops).

I told this story purely as exposition to make a point which will have to be in my next post. I have now participated in almost 3 dozen "design contests" over at a certain crowd-sourcing site and my opinion of the process has become pretty firm.

I love doing freelance design work as I decided to start my own business in a completely different field, mostly because I was tired of sitting behind a computer all day. So why not get involved with a few design competitions?

The argument is often made that participating in these "contests" is "slapping other designers in the face."

I completely disagree with that. You aren't slapping the "pros" in the face, you aren't distorting the marketplace, and if other designers can't compete it is because they are not bothering to educate their clients and the public about what makes professional design superior to amateur design which is decidedly what these sites are.

You are however deciding to slap your own face by participating in these contests. From someone who worked as an intern working 70 hours a week for less than minimum wage. I can tell you, I felt like a queen at that job by comparison. I don't buy the market saturation, devaluation argument. Mainly because I have seen that same argument in massage and more often than not massage-in-a-box usually expands the market by introducing more of the public to the benefits of massage.

A small percentage of those (I am going to say small because I am being optimistic) will of course have a bad experience, and be turned off from massage. But more people will be interested in spending money on quality, knowledgeable therapists, once they discover how beneficial massage can be.

I think some people need a little coaxing to spend money on someone else doing design work for them and lowering the barrier to entry is usually a good thing... provided they realize that it is not actually "professional" work, but skilled (sometimes unskilled) amateur work.

For the designers though, if you are trying out the contests I cannot emphasize this enough... real design businesses, even the most insane, poorly paid situations are not like these contests.

More to come in part II.