The Designer Uprising
Out of context: Reply #11
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- Boz0
Here's a long one.. naturally you don't have to read it but it's just my 2 cents on the whole topic as I haven't really participated on this topic.
Crowdsourcing if working in one country is a concept that shouldn't work because it is very hard to filter through the noise when crowdsourcing work, especially since 99% of those people are not professionals.. in reality it should work for a while but in overall it should produce very low quality of creative because anyone who is talented for the most part will not work for cheap. Unfortunately crowdsouring works for a different reason, that is a much bigger problem.
Globalization of the market.
A while back, if you were a great designer and you lived and worked in the States or a more economically and technologically advanced country 99.9% of projects and clients (no matter how small) hired you to do the job and you were paid well because you live in a country where your costs of living are high (relative to 3rd world countries) and your value in $ is higher by default, regardless of your talent. That's where we saw a differentiation between a mid-range designer less talented designer and a higher quality/talent designer. In either scenario though, both were paid to the market value of the country they live in.
Today, a talented designer living in Bulgaria, or Croatia, or Serbia or Eastern Europe or some 3rd world country can now bid on a same project for $500 because he can live there "ok" for like $500-$1000. So in essence, his/her expenses and lifestyle are not the same as someone's in the States for example and he will jump at the opportunity to do a job no matter how small to say he worked for a foreign client and so on. That is the essence of the problem here.
Globalization of the market is much more destructive economically for anyone in services industry (developers, designers etc) than someone who is offering a physical product (but even that is not great i.e. China manufacturing).
This will eventually lead to less technologically savvy people in advanced countries, design is dying for anything that's virtual and is not directly involved with the local market (and that's a huge percentage of the design application today)...
Developers are not as endangered because for better or worse, good developers are still needed on "premises" in quite a few cases and due to nature of their work many need to be trustworthy and local. But even with that, many developers are now being hired in India and other countries the same as designers. Designers, though, are the ones being killed the most.
And you can see the response of the market to this too. We are getting more sterile applications, platforms, websites. They are mostly all templatized, super simple and a lot of them lack style and creativity and this is mostly because of cost and the pushing to get it super cheap.
Even those who are good, are not necessarily designed in US, they are outsourced to other countries and then possibly built in India or China or whatever for fraction of the cost by using a framework or wordpress or whatever template you want. I have a team of people in Philippines now building one platform for someone I know and they are charging a fraction of the cost. This is very popular thing these days. So, dont' go loving your Facebooks and all these new hot startups because most of them outsource most of the development and contribute to the economic issues and unemployment in the US.
The reality my friends, for designers alone is not pretty. Creativity is still going to be present but design as profession is dying because it's being outsourced to the whole internet and other countries, so now a designer is competing with the whole world to get a project and not just local competition and the overall competitive conditions are not in favor of those living in 1st world countries. This will make sure that only a very small percentage of designers who are multi-disciplinary as well as "extremely" talented can even compete and charge a premium price in this global market.
I am not even sure that imposing a higher tax for outsourcing would produce good enough measure because for a project that realistically costs from a few grand to a million or more (based on realistic costs of your living, expenses, schools etc etc) that's being outsourced, is being done by someone in other country for $500-$1000 who can really afford it and is actually a lot of money.
This is where you can actually see how badly positioned US is in regards to this global market. While education and other socialized things in other countries benefit people and are free or very very cheap, a person who needs to be competitive in this global market but coming from US is at a huge disadvantage due to the insane costs of being competitive. So basically you are both fucked by education system in the US and utterly uncompetitive with the rest of the world.
All of this influences and causes crowdsourcing and what really makes it successful. If the services industry market (especially creative industry) was more protected from globalization, there might be a chance for designers overall but unfortunately I personally don't see that happening.
Finally, as someone who's well versed in a lot of things (from design to development and other things) my advice to designers would be DIVERSIFY. If you are doing design only you will be eaten by globalization and you will be killed off. It's inevitable and there's no way to sugarcoat it. You simply can't compete on account of design alone. Learn new skills to compliment your design skills, that's the only way you can create a higher value for yourself in this new crowd-sourced/global market.
Or start another facebook and outsource development. Oh, wait, Altly is already doing it ;)
- TLDR********
- I couldn't even get past the first paragraph because of the poor writing.********
- huh boz? I think you've got designers and developers mixed up. India for example is pumping out programmers, not typographers.randommail
- ... not designers.randommail
- TLDR