Crowd-sourcing design work

[Lee Mallabone]

Hi all,

I recently did a bit of "crowd sourcing" to get a small bit of design work done.

I made use of 99designs.com (you can see my contest if you wish).

Anyone else used any similar sites to get design or coding commissioned? Anyone been a designer or coder on such a site?

Lee.

[Peter Clark]

I've used crowdspring to find work and to find designers - works well, bloody expensive though.

[alekat]

How do you know that the design has been 100% created by the designer and did not incorporate any copyrighted material?

Also: I'd appreciate your feedback, because I dont "get" how 99designs business model works... it seems flawed to me? i.e. only the winner get's $200, but everyone else get's zilch / nudda.

So the effort that goes in, ...say only 4 people put in more than 2 hours work, then that's 200 / 8 = $50 worth of real effort, on average to create the logo in terms of value ... that you're getting, but you're paying $200.

That seems like a lose-lose scenario. I.e. entrants to the competition are incentivised to do as little work as possible, but yet still be creative enough to stand a chance of winning. Surely there's a huge risk that unscrupulouse people (or people in countries where they don't have copyright laws) or ignorant noobies will use clip art or based their work on someone else's thinking that a slight modification is ok?

I would have thought that hiring a local designer from Cambridge, or outsource to someone like logoworks, would be money better spent, no problem with being sued later because the designer was using a royalty free CD for some initial vector art, (royalty free doesnt allow him to resell, only use on his websites).. and you end up with a nasty cease and desist and have to "rebrand" your "brand"?

https://www.logoworks.com/Logo-design-recent-logos.html

what do you guys think?

cheers,

Alan

p.s. I like the logo works concept, but don't like the fact that HP bought it. I also don't like some of their small print,that states (or used to state) that they own ALL the rights to any correspondence you send them, i.e. creative briefs etc. On a small low risk project, if you're aware of the small print, I will probably use a service like this. { wonder if the small print in their contracts were there *before* HP bought them? }