Posted On December 24th, 2009 Author Kyle Racki
Filed UnderDesign, Business, Comments 32
So recently, a rather bold individual walked into our offices and proclaimed how 99designs has made our jobs obsolete, and now any company can get top-quality designs at bargain basement pricing. How true is his claim?
For those who don’t know, 99designs works this way:
You the client have a project. You upload your brief and your budget to 99designs (your budget may not even be enough to rent a motel room for a night)
Thousands of designers can compete, uploading designs for you to review
You choose from a bunch of entries, maybe even hundreds, possibly thousands, and provide feedback
You pick whichever one you like best, and pay the designer
Sounds great doesn’t it? Finally, a way to avoid shelling out thousands of dollars to a designer or firm, and a way to get exactly what you want.
Why it’s bad for designers
For ethical and sustainability reasons, spec work is bad for the design industry. Designers do not sell products, they sell their time creating products. In other words, the service of designing. This is similar to how lawyers do not sell successfully won cases, they sell their time preparing and consulting with their client with the hopes of winning said case.
To ask a designer, who would normally charge money by the hour or by the project, to give away free design work “competing” to win a project is like asking a carpenter to build you a chair with the hopes of getting paid if you like it. Would you pull 8 hours of shift work with the hopes that you would get paid if your employer is pleased with your performance?
99designs is bad for the design industry as a whole because it cheapens the profession, literally and figuratively. It perpetrates the notion that graphic design (web design etc.) is easy, and all you need is the right software and a ‘good eye’ to be able to do it effectively. The fact of the matter is, good design is not easy. More than just making nice-looking graphics, it requires problem solving ability, strategic thinking, knowledge of business, communication skills, knowledge of art history and popular culture to name a few skills. Good designers require years of training and work-experience to hone their craft and be able to deliver strong, effective design.
Therefore, to poison a clients’ mind with the idea that it is simply a matter of splashing digital paint on a computer screen and letting them decide which option they want to pay for destroys the credibility and profitability of our profession. By the way, did I mention that the budgets on 99designs are horrendously low? If a professional designer were to actually take the proper amount of time to work on any given project, at these prices, they would make more money flipping burgers.
You may ask why so many designers even bother if there is no money in it. I will explain that next.
Why it’s bad for clients
One might say that it is the designers’ choice whether or not he wants to take part in a design competition website like 99designs, and so you can hardly fault the clients for wanting cheap work if there is a professional designer out there willing to give it away.
Let me explain this with a question; What would your initial feeling be if you were to walk in a pawn shop and see what appears to be a high-quality item priced for less than 1% of what it would cost in a store? If you said you would think it’s stolen or counterfeit, then my point has been made.
So who are these people out there giving away their services for free in the hopes of getting paid, and how can they afford to feed themselves canned chick peas, let alone enjoy a comfortable living? I would put them in the following categories, and keep in mind, the term ‘designer’ is used loosely:
1) The Kid
A whiz with Photoshop and Corel Draw, this mid-pubescent designer works in the safe comfort of his parents basement and uses the competitions as a way to kill time between rounds of Unreal Tournament, and hone his understanding of lens flare effects. He’s using the 99designs projects in his portfolio to apply for design college where he will actually learn about graphic design. Is this who you want designing your corporate identity?
2) The Mass Producer
This designer believes it’s all a numbers game. She has built up such a massive library of design templates over the years, that to submit for a competition is like pulling out 2 year old Halloween candy from a barrel and dumping a handful into a new treat bag. There is no strategy, uniqueness or customized problem solving here. Just stock icons, textures and illustrations with “YOUR NAME HERE” replaced with… your actual company name. So much for “the best possible design to meet your needs”, as stated on the 99designs website.
3) The Hack
This designer just plain sucks. Having a slight understanding of design software but no understanding of design, this guy makes countless amateur mistakes like squished-type or vertically stacked words, and overused 3-D effects like drop shadows, reflections and lens flare. To him, typography is a study of maps, kerning has something to do with corn on the cob, and Paul Rand makes a brand of guitars or something. This designer needs 99designs because frankly, he couldn’t get a job designing popsicle-stand signs for the neighborhood kids even if he was paid in frozen Kool-aid. The children would just point and mock.
4) The Thief
This designer knows what good design is, but just doesn’t have the skill or patience to actually do it himself. So he finds good examples of design and rips it off. From awards galleries to Wordpress Themes, no lovely design is safe from his money-grubbing hands. What you think is an amazing design for your company brand is actually already in use by someone else, maybe even your competitor. You may not find out right away, but your customers sure will. You’ve just paid for counterfeit goods.
Okay, while I’ve clearly had too much fun writing these description, I think the point should be clearly evident; Just because in your opinion, the designs look professional on 99designs, it does not mean it is. Anyone who told you that 99designs is the same as hiring a design company or professional freelancer is simply wrong.
Professionals take time to understand your business problem. They research, they brainstorm, they get inspired, they concept and sketch before they even open Photoshop. Their finished work is not just attractive - it is original, it’s customized for you, and it strategically communicates your message to your target audience in a way that will make them remember you and buy from you. They may actually create work that you do not personally like, but unbeknown to you is precisely on target and will be effective. In fact, a professional designer could, and should challenge your perception of what good is.
Closing arguments
In many ways, I don’t envy clients. When shopping for design, they are being asked to spend money before they’ve seen a finished piece. They are buying in faith that the finished product will be good. Sure 99designs is tempting because it gives you multiple design options quickly and cheaply. Don’t be fooled. You’re better off going to a local design school (community or private college) and at least giving the students some experience. The results will probably even be better.
Especially if you are a company with a proper amount of marketing money, don’t be cheap. Hire a reputable designer or firm who will work with you. Pay them for their work. Remember that most successful companies—from Fortune 500’s to locally-owned private companies—have used good design to get to where they are. Rest assured, they did not use 99designs.
Posted On November 6th, 2009 Author Kevin Springer
Filed UnderHeadspace News, Business, Comments 4
Within one week, I attended two tourism events, which were extremely informative, inspiring and exceeded my expectations.
Last week, I traveled to the pristine Inverary Resort in beautiful Beddeck (October 28th and 29th) to attended the 5th Annual Tourism Solutions for the Cabot Trail Conference. This terrific event was hosted by Kim Lemky (our client lead in the Cabot Trail Interpretive Panels project), the Cabot Trail Tourism Coordinator.
The first night Kim hosted a Wine and Food Pairing Education Seminar with Taste of Nova Scotia Sommelier, Sean Buckland. By far the best wine pairing I have attended in years as Sean created an interactive environment, was entertaining and had the ability to engage 40+ people for well over an hour, adding witty humour to his unprecedented knowledge of wines and the industry.
The next day the actual Tourism Solutions for the Cabot Trail Conference took place with very informative guest speakers, discussion groups and great food. Topics ranged from effective signage to the unveiling an extremely successful façade/beautification program in the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, presented by Eileen Lannon Olford, CEO of CBCEDA
One of the highlights for me personally was having the opportunity to have a chat and spend time with Cape Breton resort’s GM and owner Scott MacAulay, a true visionary.
Earlier this week I hit the road again as Headspace Design had a booth at the Canada’s Tourism Leadership Summit held November 2-4 in Saint John, New Brunswick at the Saint John Trade and Convention Centre. This is an annual event produced by the Tourism Industry Association of Canada and speakers ranged from Don Bell, founder of Westjet to Ray LeBlond, on the 2010 Olympics Marketing Committee.
Many of these marketing gurus validated the approaches and methodologies we engage in with our own clients, talking about the importance of a measurable internet marketing strategy and well-designed user-experience, telling the audiences about the importance of ‘open source’ content and leveraging social media.
The trade-show component of the event was a success for our company and we are already seeing some business developing.
Posted On September 6th, 2009 Author Kyle Racki
Filed UnderBusiness, Comments 52
As many of you know, we over at Headspace are big fans of ExpressionEngine. Whenever we train our clients on how to use their CMS, we also provide a printed and digital PDF which acts as a quick reference guide. This is great for when clients are trying to remember how to use certain functions of the CMS, and calling us isn’t convenient. This way they can simply look up how to do certain things like publishing content, posting images, etc.
I thought this might be of use to many of the ExpressionEngine designers and developers out there who would love to have a handy reference but don’t want to take the pain-staking time to write and design one themselves. Feel free to download the InDesign file, re-brand it to your company, change it till your hearts’ content and have a nice deliverable to give to clients when you’re done building their EE site. The InDesign file makes use of style sheets and master templates, so it shouldn’t be too hard to completely change the look of it. For license/copyright reasons, I could not include the font files. Write in the comment form if you have any questions.
I like all of Paul’s choices for the post, including:
Multi site support
We’ve had a few instances come up where our clients have multiple websites all running off the same server. In these case, having a CMS that let’s you edit content across multiple sites from the same admin login is invaluable.
Roles and permissions
Whenever I set up a website for clients to edit themselves, there’s always some work involved in making it a pleasant experience for them. With different levels of permission, I make sure that while my Super Admin account has all of the bells and whistles that I need for development, the client’s account is significantly simplifed to make it easy for them, and also avoid the chances of them accidentally deleting everything!
User interaction
Modern sites almost always require some sort of user interaction, whether it’s filling out a contact form or adding a comment to a blog. How easy does the CMS make it to gather, store and view the data?
Managing assets
In many cases, clients need to upload images, PDF, and video files through their site. How easy is it for them to store and use the content?
These are all great points Paul made, but I have two more of my own I’d like to make:
Markup generated
Something I hate about many CMS’s is the HTML they generate. It’s frustrating to design and develop a standards based site with clean, semantic markup, only to have a content management system to spit out nested div tags with unintelligible class names like “node-21”. This sometimes can mean that your design is dictated, not by user testing or skilled designers, but the back-end code that makes the content editable.
Wake up CMS developers! The CMS should just control what flows out of the database, not what the users sees and interacts with. This is one of the reasons we love Wordpress and ExpressionEngine. Utilizing their powerful loop, it generates data and let’s you wrap it in any sort of markup you want.
Open Source vs Proprietary
This is a controversial topic, but the bottom line is this: Open source CMS’s are free to download and use, built by a community of developers. The downside is that if the CMS doesn’t have a large following, there is no one to support it, and also you don’t have a tech support phone number to call if you need help.
On the other hand, proprietary CMS’s are developed and owned by a commercial company. Some like this option because they can speak directly to the company for support and to feel taken care of. However in many cases, there is the risk of the company going under, in which case, you have to rebuild your site if you want upgrades. Also, I find that proprietary systems are more limiting than open source, simply from the fact that open source projects are built by a large community, and companies are limited to their staff.
What about you, do you have any other factors to consider when choosing a CMS?