The Designer Uprising
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- ********
Crowdsourcing, outsourcing, unpaid internships...
Who will lead us through the rapture?
- utopian0
Urban Outfitters to the Rescue...
- pango0
when are we gonna have a strike?
- utopian0
The Kings of Crowdsourcing, outsourcing, unpaid internships...
http://www.cpbgroup.com
- smooth_E0
GUYS, DONT WORRY...EVERYTHING WILL BE OK!
- ukit0
Eat what you kill, kill what you eat
- randommail0
There is no messiah.
We need to save ourselves.We need to figure out a way to re-elevate the profession. A good place to start is perhaps beating the snot out of juniors who entertain the offers of crowdsourcers and shitty agencies?
- dnoobie0
I signed-up w/ these guys. I really don't know their agenda, but they seem ready to throw-down (and are not sexist/racist - my only criteria)
- Amicus0
We work in design and advertising, right?
And, we can't collectively think of ideas to elevate our profession?
I think we should sit down and look at this problem like we would any other marketing dilemma."The World Competitive Forum’s Global Competitive Report is also very revealing. Without exception, all of the 24 countries ranked top for design appear in the top 25 in terms of competitiveness. Research by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, based on Return on Capital Employed found that the highest performing companies gave design a high strategic priority – 75 percent of the top 25 percent performers."
From New Zealand's Better by Design - http://www.betterbydesign.org.nz…
Figures like that need to be mentioned whenever we are dealing with companies, but I guess some hard and fast data is needed when it comes to small and medium size enterprises.
- 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
- ********0
@BOZ : you lost me in the midway dude....Can you summarize it for us?
- Boz0
1. crowdsourcing works because of globalization of the market.
2. you can't prevent it because there are talented people who don't have living expenses of a 1st world country but produce good work.
3. there's very little you can do to fight it but add more skills on top of the design so your design skills are a plus and not a sole source of income.I guess that's how I would summarize it.
- I guessed you missed the pointmonospaced
- I agree with 1 and 2. I think you should become even more specialised and be regarded as an expert in your niche.Amicus
- animatedgif0
"Developers are not as endangered"
I'd disagree, I've never actually seen designer work outsourced in any of the places I've worked. Yet we outsource development at the drop of a hat. In fact I even know several local developers who have set up their own studios just to outsource work to the 3rd world.Now I personally would never outsource dev work because what you get back is 90% of the time garbage that manages to do the job. But most people don't understand development or care about it that much. But at least managers can see me work and make a judgement on it and the quality, can't say the same for development where you sometimes need a keen eye to distinguish why outsourced development has resulted in a clunkier product.
- ********0
Bloody hell, 99design just got a $35 million investment from Accel Partners. LoL.
- GeorgesII0
Designer let's all uprise from our chairs,
no?
no?
okaaay...
- vaxorcist0
I had a series of gigs once rebuilding stuff that had been outsourced... there were a HUGE amount of "not quite right" assumptions, the stuff was okay based on its assumptions, but terrible based on what was really needed.....
Context is what a designer can bring.... by actually meeting the clients customers, actually living in the same place / zeitgeist / mindset / culture, a local designer can "get it" in a way that an outsourced designer may not... Most clients don't understand this till they've been burned on an outsourcing headache... where they got "ok stuff" that simply missed the target....
I think it's our responsibility to tell that story, and do it well, rather than sound like whiners...
- < exactly, it's taste and cultural awareness that the designer is really selling.monNom
- monospaced0
I think good design will carry us through. Despite crowdsourcing and outsourcing and unpaid internships, people will still be out there making good design and someone else will recognize it. Trends will be built and torn down, bad design will still be paid for, and the cycle will continue.
- monospaced0
oh hey, Boz...crowdsourcing doesn't "work" because we live in a global market, it works because there are some CHEAP MOTHERFUCKERS out there who simply don't value good design and there are suckers willing to work for free
- There are probably some very skilled, good designers living in low-cost-of-living places...vaxorcist
- yeah, but crowdsourcing NEVER WORKS! your fact doesn't even factor inmonospaced
- to us, it NEVER works , but to some clients, they love it, even if fthey get shit, some people like cheap shit...vaxorcist
- working for free is a sucker best no matter where you live.monNom
- vaxorcist0
I strongly think that "good design" will NOT carry us through.... especially as we may have similar ideas about what is "good" but many clients have totally differerent ideas and in their gut, may not listen to us as much as we think they do....
I think that awareness of the target market's mindset and appropriate, and good design will carry us through.
All too often I've had conversations with clients who seem to think "good" design is a matter of taste... their taste... and "good enough" is just that for some people who "just want to get it done on budget this week" ... for people like this, crowdsourcing is unfortunately likely to be "good enough" and the evaluation criteria is "stuff I like" vs "stuff I don't like"
I worked at a place once where the client's wife didn't like the color Orange, she said "that's a construction worker color" with a tone of crankiness... she liked muted colors, and for oddball reasons, the client deferred to her completely... The client was 54, his wife was 52, and the target market was teenagers... who were completely not likely to pay attention to the muted color work with tiny photos that the clients wife so much liked....
I've remembered how smart an agency I once worked at was about this.... wishing I had account staff like that again, as they smartly defined target market as having a TOTALLY different mindset than the CLIENT..... and made it all very clear to them in the first meeting, stopping the seedling of "good design is totally subjective" before it could grow like a weed and kill good, targetted ideas....