Part II Design and Crowd-Sourcing

I know I have been a little long-winded with some of my previous posts about design but it was all for a purpose. It was all to give those who have not worked in a design business a sense of how one might run.

Of course not every business is the same and different firms can run very differently from each other. However, what seems to be remarkably similar among design companies is client behavior and designer behavior.

Clients are supposed to be able to say, this is the material I have, this is my goal for this ad/logo/brochure etc. now do what you do best... That rarely happens. I had one time that I designed a full page ad, and the client said: "It's perfect... just make my phone number a little bigger," and they really meant it.

That was close to the response we would get from a regular client once you knew their preferences well, but even then there were almost always a half dozen small changes, or more. "I wanted you to focus on the steak dish this month, not the pie." "Can you do one with the website listed, and one without it." "I want to see one with my logo in purple and one with it in pink." "I need you to add our second phone number, and fax number, and can you make the vacuum cleaner bigger."

Some clients wanted to pick out the photos that were used, even though they had already picked the content of the photos for the photo shoot.

So it just happens sometimes that clients are weird, unpredictable, or just difficult to work with. Most of them had small reasonable requests that fit in with the needs of their company and advertising... (our phone number changed, we moved across town... we need you to replace our old logo with our new one etc.)

Occasionally you get the "I don't know what I want... but I know what I don't want... and I know that I will know what I want when I see it..." client.

"Just make me something and I will tell you if I like it."

It makes me cringe just thinking about it.

And as I mentioned in my first post on the subject you often get the crazy ego client that wants you to spend extra time just so they can have their ego stroked, or feel like they got their money's worth.

The worst case scenario is a combination of the two. These are the people that say "I don't like this... do something else."

"Well what don't you like about it? The colors, the photo used, the font, the style?"

Knowing what they do not like is actually important information, and even with these clients you could usually get something out of them. Such as: "well the style is all wrong. We are an elegant restaurant and this is too playful, and we don't even want to focus on that dish. I don't know why they took a picture of it and I was hoping for a script font...."

You see all of a sudden the person who didn't know what they wanted is giving you valuable info.

This is exactly what does not happen in these online design contests... and it is so endlessly frustrating.

It is like they are combining freelance design, with amateur competition, with ego mania clientelé, and gave you the worst of all three.

What is the worst part of freelance design? I think it is having to deal with subjectivity and whims of clients. You have to walk a fine line between meeting the needs and wants of the clients which can sometimes be at odds with each other. Ideally a designer could avoid those clients who do not truly value that specific designer's style and expertise, but that is generally easier said than done. It is actually impossible in design contests, because "clients" do not pick the designers, nor do the designers have any real knowledge of the "clients."

Second as a freelancer you do not always get to work with a team of other designers. In design contests it is every designer for themselves. What do I mean by that... well in the non-blind competitions and I would guess about 2/3rds of the contests are non-blind. Everyone can see your design and the contest holder has the ability to rate your design.

If you were part of a design team it would not be unheard of nor unreasonable for another designer to render the same concept differently. We know the client wants bubbles in their design that go from small to large and for one bubble to surround the word... There are many different ways this could be portrayed... It is possible they might like the style of another designer better or a different presentation better.... There is no problem with that because as a part of a team you are still going to get paid, especially if you derived the concept that is ultimately chosen... even if your application of it is not used.

In these contests the moment you get a 4 or 5 star rating all the other designers will start devising variations of your design. Or as 99designs likes to say "you do not own the concept but the implementation of the concept." Which means the other designers can use the same font, and the exact same idea, implement it a little differently... like using an ellipse instead of a bubble or a flat circle instead of a 3-d one etc., and it is permitted. But if their blatant copy-catting gets picked as the winner... you get zero and they get paid.

Not only that but sometimes the client will decide that your concept is the one they want... which means the other designers, if they want a chance at winning, have no choice but to devise an "implementation" of your concept if they want to stay in the contest. Your design in-effect becomes the new design-brief.

What is your reward if your concept is chosen but your specific submission is not? nothing.

I was in a contest once in which another designer put up a fairly generic design. Orange chromatic dots in a straight line over the name of the company in a black sans serif font.

It got 4 stars. The winning design, submitted by another designer, used the same font, the exact same color dots/font, the exact same shade and size of dots, but put them in a spiral pattern instead of a straight line. That is what the client wanted and paid for.

They see all these designers as "their design team." So it is perfectly natural to see an alternative to a design that they like.

The other issue is that you cannot submit the exact same design as someone else or it is considered copyright infringement and could get you banned from the site.

So the original designer could not at that point resubmit the spiral design as a variation of their own work because that would magically be copyright infringement of the designer who is blatantly ripping off the previous designer. I have seen some designers get around this by putting up dozens of variations of their own design the moment they get a high rating. The problem is that it is really not possible to come up with everything someone else might derive off of your work.

This brings me to the idea of a contest. You see the trouble with creative contests in general is that they are often a pass/fail scenario. You do not get feedback, you do not find out how to improve etc. You just find out that you did not make it. The upside is that there are usually specific standards that they have to publicly announce that they will be judging you on, and they generally have to make it clear how they will be judging it.... That's the benefit of a contest.

Also, generally other people are not allowed to copy your work or derive work from it, particularly after it has been submitted. Imagine, for example, a poetry contest in which someone could read your poem after submission and use one of your stanzas as your own, or a drawing contest in which they could see that you used a tiger in your drawing and then use one of their own. This is almost universally considered cheating in normal talent-oriented contests.

But it is not "cheating" in a design contest because you are all a "design team," and why else would they be rating your designs except for the purpose of telling the designers what direction you want them to go in...

Then you get to deal with the huge crazy client ego that seems to grow out of these contests. There is something about having that "eliminate" button. I don't know what it is but I have been in so many contests in which hours of my work was eliminated without comment, even when there were very specific briefs, that were followed exactly with very skilled designs submitted.

Gone instantly... without any explanation, or criteria for what they are judging on.

So you don't get the benefit of even finding out what they don't like... only that they don't like your design... for some reason. Then if it is a visible contest you can only try and look at the designs they have rated or not-eliminated as some criteria for what they are actually wanting.

Sometimes these designs are very different from the "brief." Of course that wouldn't matter if they were your client... clients change their minds... but contest holders are not supposed to get to change their minds. They are supposed to have to stick to the guidelines they set out or its not really a contest. That is like changing the rules of a game in the middle of it.

So we are supposed to function like designers and be willing to give revisions if requested, as if they were our actual client... some clients request this... But even then, it is a delicate issue. If you rate my design one star and then ask for a different color... well what's the point? Will you like it that much more in blue instead of red and I've already wasted several hours on this... the prize is 250... do I want to waste a few more?

Honestly every time I have ever done a revision of my design at 99designs the "client" liked the new design less and generally rated it lower. Plus there is another issue: sometimes they don't exactly ask properly for you to revise it. Why does this matter? because you are not their design team and you are not getting paid. Since they are holding all the money, and all the cards most clients end up on a weird ego trip where they suddenly envision themselves your boss whom you are supposed to be bending over backwards for.

"I need to see this is 3 different colors." "You need to design some kind of symbolic icon to go with this." etc. My response.... "um I did as much as I am willing to do if I were getting paid $200 dollars for this design. Which I am likely not, seeing as you want some specialized icon designed which was not mentioned before."

Likewise your designs get dismissed sometimes with snarky comments. As if you were somehow foolish to think that that would be a good interpretation of their brief. Often when designers complain that no feedback was given on their design the contest holders says something like "the designs submitted varied greatly in quality and the ones eliminated didn't warrant any comments."

So is it a design contest in which it is reasonable to get eliminated with no real feedback... pass/fail style?

Or is it a designer-client relationship in which finding out what they do not like about your design is just as important as finding out what they do like.

For as a contest they get to change the guidelines without notice, extend the length of the contest, edit the brief, judge without any criteria, end the contest on a whim, and even withdraw the contest without awarding anyone. I have seen contests that did this after awarding designs 4 and 5 stars. They loved the designs and still didn't pick a winner.... mmmhmmmm.

If it is a client-designer relationship then I should get paid for work that is derivative of my own, I should get some feedback after I have spent hours of work for you even if it is simply to tell me what you do not like or how I failed to achieve what you wanted, and finally I should get paid for my time even if the client changes their mind about getting the logo.

Imagine if a client came to you and said... I love this design, and the concept is great... let me talk to 20 other designers and see what they will do with this concept before I agree to going with yours.... and BTW if I like their design better I will pay them and not you.

Meanwhile the one contest I have won thus far, the client didn't even know what file types he was asking for. He promptly emailed me to tell me he could not open the illustrator file I provided, that he had specifically asked for, because he did not have the right software. This guy wanted 7 different file formats btw. So he requested that I email him the software for opening it.

That's right he wanted me to email him software that was worth more than the award for his contest... seriously. I told him to download adobe reader.

Even nicer clients, who mysteriously do not end up on an ego trip, are still like your worst lunatic client. The one who thinks you should bend over backward for them even if they don't pay you, who has absolutely no sense of fairness or loyalty to you, and who will stab you in the back at a moment's notice. It's like having a contest run by a child that doesn't know what they really want, and has no clue what design is all about, and thinks any whim that fancies them is just fine, even refusing to pay anyone.

Meanwhile the commitment designers show by submitting a well rendered design that followed the specifications of the client is almost never honored. Why would it be... if 50 designers submit designs who has time to comment on them all, or even bothering to thank them before eliminating their entry.

And the worst part is, truly inferior designs often win over the more skilled ones. I actually created a custom text for one contest. I was really pleased with what I came out with. It was simple: two colors conveyed the idea very clearly, and was the exact sort of font they were looking for... I couldn't find one I was satisfied with so I rendered my own... with my pen tool, illustrator, and lots of time.

Someone else put the same words in a generic sans serif... in black with an orange rectangle over it to represent a "sales tag." It got 4 stars... mine got 2. (BTW it was a good thing that I lost... I noticed afterwards that they requested the winning logo be put into a business card design, website header, and stationary design, all for the same prize $200... seriously). I lost one to a design that was a messy recreation of the Ubuntu logo with a couple of large dots in the middle, it wasn't clear what the dots were for but it didn't really make any sense in terms of that contest.

There is often no rhyme or reason to any of the "client's" choices. But why would there be? They do not have a skilled professional walking them down the path helping them choose the right style, font, icon, colors for them. No one is helping them make an informed decision on what will best serve their needs. Their design team is a team in the same sense that a bunch of betas in the same bowl are a family, and the only incentive a designer would have for helping the client is some guarantee that they would get paid... a guarantee they cannot give them until the contest is actually won... and the final design is picked.

So ummmm... no you aren't "slapping other designers." If other designers can't convince clients to go for a real professional designer or design team, over the proverbial cock-fight of the design world, then they are a huge failure at marketing themselves, specifically at knowing what makes them, their skill set, and a working relationship with them valuable and great.

If they can't do that much for themselves how exactly will they be able to pull it off when designing a logo, a brochure, an ad, or a website? How are you going to help your client figure out a direction for their design that will appeal to their target market, if you can't communicate your own basic value as a professional to other human beings? Come on the slapping other designers thing is weak. Especially since many of the designers on these sites are from less developed countries.

The only designer you are slapping or perhaps should be slapping is yourself when you participate in these contests. Though I do think you may be doing a disservice to the "client" as well. It just kind of feels like doing a massage without knowing the contraindications for massage. Fever... what fever?

Another interlude on My Design Experience

Once upon a time, long ago when I was designing ads for a small local magazine, a brief came through for a regular client of ours. They owned a jewelry business, and to be frank they were generally a big headache.

For their very first ad for example, we had to "clean up" or rather "rebuild" the client's logo which someone seemed to have put together in microsoft paint... or maybe they just drew it right onto the business card... I'm not sure. In any case we had to rebuild it exactly, even to the point of rendering a unique font... just without all the mess that came with its initial creation.

Lots of fun, that I luckily did not have to participate in. Other quirky issues came about periodically with this client, but this particular month promised to be an easy one. The jeweler wanted to feature men's platinum wedding rings. The ad was to target men who were well off and thinking about getting married. So we got adjectives like "high-end," "sophisticated," and "male-oriented."

So what did I have to work with? Their photo shoot had produced some very nice close-ups of four of their platinum wedding rings for men. Unfortunately the light in the pictures came out very pinkish making the photo look more like it was advertising charm bracelets to little girls.

So I picked out a good shot of the rings and got to work. I decided that since there was so much pink and peachyness in the picture to adjust the colors more toward the orange end instead of pink. I also decided to work on increasing the contrast, and decreasing the color overall so that the shine, and silver color of the rings would really pop.

After over an hour of adjustments I ended up with a photo that looked at first glance like it was only using 3 colors: black, white, and a pale shade of orange. It was awesome. The orange tint was right along the shine on the ring that was the focal point of the photo and most of the other colors were effectively gone. The black and white really made the delicate gradient of the silver just pop out. It looked elegant, sophisticated, and very masculine for a jewelry ad. I got dozens of compliments from the other designers.

Everyone thought it was perfect... we even told our customer service rep to explain to the client in detail what the design did, and how it did it... and to compare it to ads in very expensive national publications... etc.

The client hated it. Our editor-in-chief even called to argue on behalf of the design because he thought it was that great... but it was to no avail. They requested we use the same image but without any adjustments... That's right pink, no contrast, washed out colors on the rings... It really did look like an ad for little girls.

Now, I'm not saying that the client was wrong and I was right. Though certainly I think my design did a far better job of what they asked for, than what they insisted upon later. However I didn't know their clients, and it is entirely possible that my somewhat stylized color scheme was all wrong for the real target market. It is also possible, and likely that the client went with their own aesthetic preferences over what would have been best for their target market.

I suspect the truth is somewhere in between. The target market was not as high-end/sophisticated as we were led to believe, and the local market may not have "gotten" the ad that I made. (That's right you aren't sophisticated enough for MY AD... or in other words if I run my beautiful, fabulous, amazing ad it will likely be a failure and waste of money for the client... same difference right...) Likewise, the client did not realize that the pink and low contrast of the original photo would not likely appeal to the intended audience.

But instead of trying to appeal to them on the idea of "not going in that direction" we were focused on trying to get them to go in the direction of the ad that we thought was best. So we ended up with an ad that the client liked, the designer hated, and that likely failed in reaching its target audience. Believe me, it was very pink.

The trouble was since we were primarily a magazine functioning as a design firm we were a little out of our league when it came to figuring out what were reasonable revision requests.

In this case a simple "I don't like what you did to the photo," would have sufficed. We could have come up with a softer version with the pink removed or even gone for a gray scale version. Once the client started telling us to do the same picture without adjustments... all of our designs skills and aesthetic/marketing knowledge got removed from the equation.

Just put this here, and that there, and our logo here and that will magically do what the ad is intended to do right?

But the fact is we weren't a design firm... we were the production team of a magazine who was "building their ad," we were not "designing their marketing." That was apparently a delusion we kept stumbling into whenever a client accidentally mentioned a target market, or an intended goal for the ad. Funny how that happens.

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.