Can Crowdsourcing Benefit Your Design Career?

Episode #28 Transcript

PUBLISHED ON JANUARY 25, 2012

Welcome to Onward Search Career Cast, the podcast that brings you the latest insight and career advice from experts within the Internet marketing and creative space.  Onward Search is a leading nationwide provider of web-based talent and offers a full range of recruitment and staffing solutions. If you’re looking for a career in search engine optimization, interactive design, or emerging technologies, you should apply online at onwardsearch.com or call 1-800-829-0072 and speak with an experienced recruiter today.

Hillary O'Keefe: Welcome everyone to a brand new episode of the Onward Search Career Cast. I’m your host Hillary O’Keefe, and today we will be discussing a topic that generally gets a pretty bad rap amongst members of the interactive design community. So to put a fun spin on this episode, I invited two guests to join me to share their thoughts on the topic. One believes that what we’re going to discuss has potential benefits for interactive designers, especially those who are fresh out of college or looking for a job; while the other remains firmly on the other side of the fence that it’s basically just a bad thing all around.

Matt, welcome to the Career Cast. How is everything going today?

Matt Cooke: It’s going very well. Thanks so much for having me on, Hillary. I will be the curmudgeon today.

Hillary O'Keefe: Excellent. Great. Thank you so much for joining me today. And Rick, how are you doing?

Rick Byrne: Pretty good. And I’m the one who’ll be having the more positive view.

Hillary O'Keefe: Wonderful. So here it is. I’m going to say it. Today’s topic is crowdsourcing. Did you hear that? Members of our audience just booed and hissed over the topic. But before we get into why that is, let’s talk about why you both are such good sources of information about crowdsourcing.

First up, we have Rick Byrne who has been working in the design industry for 20 years and currently works for CBS Interactive. He’s also been writing a design career blog called designcareer.wordpress.com since 2009 and his blog has covered topics such as crowdsourcing design, entering design competitions, portfolio sites and working with recruiters. My other guest is Matt Cooke. He is the creative director and co-owner of Iron Creative which is a full service design agency located in the Bay Area. He also teaches user experience at the Academy of Art University.

You both have solid backgrounds in design and you’re both familiar with all sides of the crowdsourcing debate, right?

Matt Cooke: We do.

Rick Byrne: It is true, yes.

Hillary O'Keefe: Let’s start by talking about how crowdsourcing got such a miserable reputation in the first place.

Matt Cooke: Rick, do you want to start that up?

Rick Byrne: Sure. I’ll jump in here. Essentially, crowdsourcing originally named in a Wired magazine article, the phrase came to life back in 2006. It’s the idea that instead of giving a specific task to one individual that you farm it out to many individuals and from that, the right solution would be achieved then. From this in the design world, this means that only one person gets paid for the final design that’s chosen. So the other people that submit work essentially don’t get paid. So it gets looked at as spec work by the design community. And spec work is something that the AIGA is definitely very much against, the AIGA being the design professional body.

Hillary O'Keefe: Matt, what’s your take on how crowdsourcing became so frowned upon?

Matt Cooke: I think it’s a really interesting topic for conversation. Rick and I were just discussing this a little bit before. One of the most high profile instances of crowdsourcing and how that kind of backfired was the recent example with the GAP logo. I don’t how much you guys remember about that.

Hillary O'Keefe: Oh, yes.

Matt Cooke: As you recall the GAP logo kind of went up one day and there was a huge backlash amongst the design community and amongst just consumers in general which surprise, - I think it surprised the GAP tremendously. And then the water got a little bit muddy as to whether or not that they were going to offer this up as a crowdsourcing project or whether this had, in fact, been a crowdsourcing project. The term crowdsourcing was thrown out by GAP in association with this. There was this tremendous negative ground-swelling around the design and suddenly those two things became associated with one another.

Now, of course, the negative connotations and associations around crowdsourcing have been with this for a long time but I felt like that was a pivotal moment where crowdsourcing kind of crossed over and many, many more people became aware of it and became perhaps negatively influenced by the press that was going on at the time. But it kind of shows us, it gives us this kind of nice barometer of how people feel about crowdsourcing and how for a multinational corporation, it can actually backfire quite horribly.

Rick, do you have any recollection of that event or any take on how that went down?

Rick Byrne: I think you have more of a good background on it. I think to add to my earlier point as well, people forget that the RFP process (requesting for proposals) is also crowdsourcing but on a different scale. Because of budgets are for a half a million or a million dollars, people completely ignore the fact that it’s spec work or crowdsource work but it is essentially a corporate version of crowdsourcing. And I felt that since the design community was perfectly happy with that already, it seemed unusual then that when it’s applied to the lower end of the scale, that there’s this very visceral reaction.

Matt Cooke: And I think you made an interesting point and I just briefly would like to kind of go over that, and that’s things about the AIGA’s perspective on doing spec work. As you mentioned the AIGAs is the professional association for design and represents the design community here in America and beyond. The point of view is very clear that we shouldn’t ever work speculatively.

The notion of crowdsourcing kind of is in conflict with our own professional association’s code of conduct. There is some friction there. I guess also it just depends on the nature of the crowdsourcing project. So some services and the one that I’ve been involved in, we pay a flat fee regardless of the outcome of the creative work. So people are getting paid and therefore, it’s not necessarily speculative. The speculative part is on my end where I take the risk and hope something great comes back, and we’ll get into that a little bit later.

There’s a number of reasons why crowdsourcing could and has, in fact, got this kind of negative view amongst our community.

Hillary O'Keefe: Rick, I understand you performed a crowdsourcing experiment on your blog Design Career where you responded to a spec brief before sending out one yourself. So on the response side of things, despite the fact that your designs were rejected and that nothing that you worked on was accepted, did you get anything out of the process of submitting your design?

Rick Byrne: What drew me to it, to want to submit more than just one solution was the fact that I really liked the brief. The brief was for a company that analyzes data for cell phone companies and works out when they should actually – the clients or customers – should be propositioned with either an upgrade or a free product to prevent them from going to another network. To me that seemed very interesting. It was like a problem that had to be cracked. Actually in the end, I submitted four different designs because I was somehow obsessed with cracking this brief. I enjoyed it purely as a mental exercise and found it very rewarding and I might even put one of the designs in my portfolio as a result.

Other projects that were available at the time were things like logos for hotels or pubs, there was even a sorority or for contractors; none of those really intellectually challenged me in the same way that this one project did.

Hillary O'Keefe: So there’s our first benefit to participating in crowdsourcing briefs. It was a challenge for you, both mentally and creatively. But at the other end of it, after you put in those five hours of work, were you at all concerned that your work would be taken and executed anyway without your permission?

Rick Byrne: There’s always that worry even if you’re doing RFPs or pitches in the competitive environment. It’s essentially part of what the design community have to transition to where you put in all these hours of work, whether it’s a pitch, an RFP or even crowdsource projects. It’s really like playing Russian roulette; you hope yours is picked, you hope yours is the best but you kind of always understand that most of the time it’s not going to be that case.

Hillary O'Keefe: Matt, here’s your chance to fire back curmudgeon style. What’s your take on who owns those submissions from briefs?

Matt Cooke: I think that’s a great question, and I I might surprise you by turning the tables a little bit here. As a designer myself and as someone that runs a design company, I try to take the longer view about intellectual property. I know that might not seem like the most sound business advice to give, but over the course of your career, what you’re trying to do, and what we’re all trying to do, is build relationships with people that turn from single projects to multiple projects, and from multiple projects to multi-year relationships, and that’s really what I’m in the game for.

So the thought that someone might take an idea from an RFP or from a crowdsourcing project and maybe use it or tweak it and use it actually doesn’t really bother me, which may come as a bit of a surprise but I feel like in the kind of totality of my career, it’s really going to come down to relationships, and I’m going to build those one on one with folks and I’m just going to let go the notion that someone might steal some of my work.

Hillary O'Keefe: So if someone takes your logo, it’s not going to make or break you, right?

Matt Cooke: Exactly. And I think all of us in our career – you’re looking at career, you’re not necessarily kind of looking at how did I effectively spend the last five hours or ten hours or even a week or a month. You’re looking at I’m going to be in this game for 10, 15, 20 years if I’m lucky and I’m going to enjoy it. And the way I’m going to enjoy it is by forming really great relationships with my clients, with my colleagues and peers. If someone takes advantage of you along the way in a relatively small way, if you take that kind of 10, 15 year timeline, I think that’s just all part and parcel of the business that we’re in. It’s not ideal, but it will all work out for the best, I think, in the end.

Rick Byrne: To follow on from that, one thing I mention in my blogpost about is where design firms and agencies like Matt pride is having that ongoing relationship with the client, something that crowdsourcing can’t provide.

Hillary O'Keefe: Very true. And speaking of clients, I know you both experimented with crowdsourcing from the client side as well by submitting your own proposals.

Rick first, what caliber of designs did you receive from your proposal?

Rick Byrne: The proposal was to basically redesign my own branding for myself which probably might sound abhorrent to people in the design community. But I thought why not put the money where it should go and just see what happened in the experiment.

What happened with that was only one person that responded I felt actually really read the brief, read all the background material and really grasped the brief. All of the rest essentially produced either repurposed logos from other design competitions or logos that just weren’t that compelling or didn’t really grasp what was needed or was just a slight change from what already existed.

So the design community can breathe a collective sigh of relief and go, oh well thank God, you see the quality is clearly lower. And if that one person hadn’t actually responded, say if they hadn’t seen that come up on the website, then my experience might be much worse. I’d be probably sitting here joining Matt with the negative view on crowdsourcing but that one person who did it and who did it extremely well to a very high standard, is what won me over. I only needed one person because I’m only going to have one logo and one set of branding and that’s all I needed.

As a result, I have this more positive view but as I said, if that designer hadn’t submitted for that competition, I’d probably have a more negative view of crowdsourcing.

Hillary O'Keefe: So I see this as being a positive spin to the crowdsourcing debate because it seems that it may be something that the design community doesn’t really have to worry about at all. In fact, Matt, when you experimented with the proposal side, you pitted your own internal design team at your agency, Iron Creative, against the crowd. What did you learn from that experiment about the quality of submissions compared to what your team produced?

Matt Cooke: I was relieved to find out our own team absolutely kind of blew the other guys – the crowd - out of the water which is good news and it kind of justified our business and our kind of reason to be.

The reason that we conducted the experiment was that we would time and time again, I guess, after this period from 2006 onwards, we would get clients coming to actually to us and saying, look, we want a brand identity, we want a website, we want this, that, and the other. And then we would put together our proposal, they would look at the fees and say look, I don’t understand. I can go online and get myself a logo for a couple of hundred bucks. Why would I pay you guys in $1 or $20K, whatever it was, and after a while, it grinds you down. You think well really, I wonder… maybe we’re conning people. Maybe this is not a sustainable business in the new crowdsourced landscape. So we conducted an experiment and literally when online and found of the services that one of these clients had recommended and let’s see what happens and see how true that is.

And the work that came back I’m pleased to say was of such poor quality that even with the contracted unlimited rounds of revisions that this organization gave us, after two rounds with this, we just cut our losses and said thanks, that was great but there is nothing in here that we could even use as inspiration. I was chatting with Rick a little bit before; the other reason we did it was I thought well there could be something in this for us as a business. We could use as a crowd to generate concepts that we then take and we refine and we develop. And in that way we might be able to short-circuit some of the research that we have to do. And again on that front, absolutely not; the ideas that came back were, at best, horrible clichés and at worst, incoherent.

So in a way, it’s good news for us as a business. It’s good news for us as a profession that our years of schooling and our years of experience and the thought that we put into this game really does pay off. It does enable us to challenge higher fees and those are entirely justifiable because of all of the experience and all of the work that we’ve put in to getting to this point. Certainly, you can go online, drop a couple of hundred bucks, get yourself a logo. It’s not a professionally designed logo and you should just be aware of that fact.

If you’re a small business and you’re not relying on your brand identity, then that’s probably a decent way to go. But if you’re a small to midsize company or a large company and your brand identity is central to your business strategy, then go to some professional.

Rick Byrne: I think a good follow on point to Matt’s is the fact that the more you pay on the crowdsourcing projects, the better the response is. Just like in the competitor world of design agencies, the more you pay, the better the response is.

Hillary O'Keefe: It makes sense.

Rick Byrne: So that too is one way to get a better caliber of response. Unfortunately, most of the crowdsourced logo projects or similar projects actually have low budgets compared to the actual and the usual design firm pricing.

Hillary O'Keefe: So based on both of your experiences, it sounds like we may once and for all be able to end the crowdsourcing debate and to say look, the design community has really nothing to worry about, but there is value in participating in crowdsourcing, right?

Rick Byrne: I mentioned in my blog that if you’re, say, unemployed or if you’re a student or even if you want to build up a portfolio in another area than say your current job covers, it’s a great way of tackling the real world briefs and feeding that compulsion, that kind of sense that you have to respond to somebody else’s problem being proposed. I would say it’s a great way of building up a portfolio and certain experience. Remember, you can also win some of these design competitions – crowdsourcing competition – so that this is a tremendous boost in confidence.

Also as a slightly aside to the career aspect of it, all of us as designers always get asked to do logos or small pet projects of other people and they’re usually friends or friends of friends, and usually they either don’t pay or there’s very minimal pay and they usually don’t end well, I’m sorry to say, and sour relationships and what.

And now every designer in the world can say, “well I’m not available right now but actually I know this fantastic site that will give you lots of results and essentially you don’t have to pay that much,” and inside they’re thinking thank God I dodged a bullet there.

Hillary O'Keefe: Matt, what’s the value in crowdsourcing from your perspective?

Matt Cooke: I think Rick makes a really good point. I went back to school to get Master’s degree in design and one of my professors basically said to me, it doesn’t matter how good you are or how good you think you are, design is like a sport and you need to practice constantly. So if you’re bereft of ideas, you don’t have anything going on and you want to tackle a real world brief and pit your skills against some other folks, then I think there’s value in that and it’s not to be sniffed at.

I would worry that if you become associated with some of those lower fee services, that might be value your own identity, if you will, your own brand in the design marketplace. We have to bear in mind that often you’re not competing with folks in the western world or the developed world or industrialized world, however you want to call that; you’re competing with people who are able to get by on a lot less money. You’re pitting your wits against folks who are probably going to be able to justify putting more time to the brief than you.

Personally I would steer clear of it if I were a designer and I would tackle projects that are going to benefit me in my career, maybe improving my own portfolio, redesigning my website, coding something specific for a friend and really building my own brand equity rather than just taking on spec work, but that’s just my point of view.

Rick Byrne: I’ve got two very good follow on points from what Matt said there. Matt mentioned people designing it in other parts of the world. If this designer who was far better than everybody else was actually in South Africa, so clearly they have the money that I put up for my branding to be redone, it goes a lot further there.

Hillary O'Keefe: It sounds like the value of crowdsourcing is very different for each individual who is considering it, whether it’s a job seeker or a new graduate who’s looking for experience or someone who maybe comes from a less commercially developed area of the world, such as South Africa. Does that sound right?

Matt Cooke: Yes I mean that sounds right for me, Hillary. I’d extend that to talk a little bit about the market you’re in, even in the US. Rick and I are very lucky we live in San Francisco, we’re on the northern tip of Silicon Valley. We’ve got multi-million dollar companies all around us that need ongoing work and it’s relatively easy to pick that up as either a freelancer or as a business. But if you’re living in a more remote part of the country and you don’t have immediate and direct access to those big businesses, perhaps this is a good way to broaden your network and dip your toe in the water. I would have thought that would be more beneficial to a recent college graduate. But even to someone with experience who finds themselves in a more isolated situation, it could be of benefit.

Hillary O'Keefe: Rick, any closing points?

Rick Byrne: Matt brought up a good point there about more longer term involved projects. These are projects that would actually do well in crowdsourcing. I actually got a lot of my questions responded to by the crowdsourcing website that I was in touch with and they said basically they stopped doing coding projects, those longer involved projects because they just really didn’t work for crowdsourcing at all. Like I say, we have access to those kind of ongoing relationships but if you’re in a part of the world where that’s harder to forge that relationship, crowdsourcing may or may not provide a way of doing that. It might not be those long term projects but it could be something bigger than just say logos or what’s available to you physically in your immediate city or environment.

Hillary O'Keefe: Well, there you have it. I think we can safely say that crowdsourcing isn’t a terrible disease that’s plaguing the interactive design community and robbing it of valuable work opportunities. I’d say it serves a couple of good purposes for those who can benefit from gaining experience and taking jobs that may offer slightly lower pay rates. And as Matt mentioned, it may be even serve as a source of inspiration for agencies like Iron Creative.

Matt and Rick, thank you so much for me joining today on the show.

Rick Byrne: Thank you for having me.

Matt Cooke: Thank you very much.

Hillary O'Keefe: To all the interactive designers out there, don’t forget to check out the creative jobs section on onwardsearch.com which has brand new design and development jobs posted to it all the time.

Also, be sure to take a look at the Rick’s blog designcareer.wordpress.com and check out Matt’s agency, Iron Creative.

Thank you all so much for tuning in and I’ll meet you right back here for another episode of the Onward Search Career Cast.

Thank you for tuning in to Onward Search Career Cast. For more information on the career opportunities available through Onward Search, you should visit us online at onwardsearch.com or call 1-800-829-0072 and speak with an experienced recruiter. And you should also follow Onward Search on Twitter at twitter.com/onwardsearch.