In the industry of Graphics and Web designing this is one of the debatable topics that either crowdsourcing is good or evil. Many different organizations like Spac Watch keep an eye on graphic and web design crowdsourcing and boycott these service as they are in total loss of the designers.
According to Wikipedia, ‘Crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks traditionally performed by contractors to an undefined large group of people or community through an open call’. Jeff Howe considered being the father of crowdsourcing, first authors to employ this term. Here in this article we will discuss how crowdsourcing is evil for businesses as well.
Unprofessional Heads
This is one thing that businesses needs to understand that by calling the group of people (designers) to do your work can be risky as most of the designers who are going to listen to you will be newbie’s and can mess your branding image. Obviously you are the one who is going to decide the best design but usually business owners ends up with no winners and they waste their time and money by launching a contest through some crowdsourcing website.
Copyright Issues
This is again one that can harm your business on a serious scale, usually most of the crowdsourcing platforms do not guarantee that the logo you select is custom and has not been used before by any other company. What if you select the winner and after a month, you find out that the logo contains some copyright issues? Where is the designer? This kind of situation will lead you to mental and financial stress.
Quality vs. Quantity
I don’t think that anyone has debate on that Quality is inversely proportional to quantity. In 6 days of contest (sometimes even less) a designer has to create different concepts, runtime designing edits in case of the clients’ desire and other stuff. This is lot of work and in order to accomplish this, a designer will have to compromise on the quality of the design and idea which is ultimately harmful for one’s business.
Design without feel
Obviously, everyone works for money but this is not the only factor. What makes logo a LOGO is the passion for design. When it comes to crowdsourcing people usually work for money and they lack the passion, this is what hurts the business permutation on the long run.
Conclusion
Crowdsourcing may sound a win win game for business owners, but in real corwdsourcing is not only evil for designers but equally harmful for business owners as saving few dollars can massively harm their business reputation on a larger scale.
