daniele capo

Yesterday was the day of spec work, it seems. I’ve found a link on swiss miss to a vulgar article about crowdsourcing on Forbes, then I’ve read (and commented) a thread on typophile about a so-called design contest etc.

I’ve seen that designer try to face the problem with this kind of discourse (and I agree with it): spec works is bad also for the clients because ill-payed designers aren’t likely to work for the necessary amount of time to provide a well designed logo, etc.

The math behind the reason, in the typophile thread, was shown correctly like that: if the award for the competition is 200$ and the competitors are 10, the designer has 10% of probability to be the winner and, for this reason, the expected return is 20$. The result is unsatisfacted designers and unsatisfactorily design. Not a good deal for the client.

Does this line of thought works?

While I agree I also see that this is a weak argument for the kind of clients we want to convert. The main problem I see is that we are still looking the things from the eyes of the designer, and I suspect the client that goes to a crowdsourcing site isn’t going to be persuaded by the argument. It’s a matter of realpolitik (I have to write a post about the love of italian politics for the term).

I try to reverse the math:
the client pay 200$ and s/he can choose 10 different ‘logos’. This mean that the client pays 20$ for each.
Otherwise s/he can pay 200$ directly to a good designers that s/he knows. The good designer will not provide ten different choices (I hope). And the client have a limited set of alternatives to choose from (remember, we are talking about of a potential client of a crowdsourcing site). Also, I don’t think 200$ for a real logo work is the fair price. Maybe the designer should ask for 500$ or 700$ or even more. And the client will pay 500$/700$ for a limited set of alternative concepts (for the sake of simplicity, 2).

client math

 x     y
——— < ———
20    250

here x and y are quanties that represents the quality of design. Then y should be at least 12.5 times x.

If the client choose the right path the quality of the work must be perceived more than ten times better than the quality of the crowdsourcing service. This mean that the client should be educated to see and understand such a thing.

The awful truth about clients

We assume that everybody sees. This is not true. Moreover we are flooded by an enormous amount of visual noise, and our clients are trained by that noise, they assume that this is how the things should be.

For that reason we must develop our own sight, we must learn how to educate and to teach how to see. Otherwise trying to convince somebody to pay a fair price can be a self frustrating excercise (and, yes, for the moment I try to first educate myself).