Why Designers Hate Crowdsourcing - Forbes.com

Experienced designers disdain companies like 99designs, which thrives on hordes of people willing to work for a mere chance at a payout.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Mix crowdsourcing, the Internet and a huge pool of underemployed graphic designers, and the outcome is a company that's grabbed a great deal of attention. In the two and a half years since it launched, Web startup 99designs out of Melbourne, Australia, boasts that it's helped to broker 48,000 graphic design projects for big name clients like Adidas and DISH Network as well as for thousands of small businesses.

Acting as a middleman between business owners and graphic designers, the 99designs site hosts contests in which clients post their needs--website design, logos, print packages--and designers compete to fill them. Instead of bidding for the job, designers submit finished work tailored to the client specifications in the contest listing. 99designs calls it a win-win scenario: Its clients gain access to the site's pool of 73,000 active designers, while the designers are given a chance to compete for "upwards of $600,000 in awards paid out monthly."

 The company seems to be winning too. It says it will generate $12 million in revenues this year, is growing at a 10% monthly clip and has opened a San Francisco office to handle its business development and marketing.

But many in the graphic design community say 99designs isn't such a good thing.

"99designs is something akin to a Walmart," says Dan Ibarra, industry veteran and co-founder of Aesthetic Apparatus, a Minneapolis design studio. "It's not necessarily dedicated to bringing you good work, but to bring you a lot of it. That's not necessarily better."

Ibarra's thoughts echo the general response from designers to a 2009 article Forbes ran on a 99designs look-alike called Crowdspring.com. Many critics of Crowdspring's business model directed readers to NO!SPEC.com, an online campaign dedicated to educating the public about the risks of speculative work--which is, as defined by NO!SPEC, work in which the designer "invests time and resources with no guarantee of payment," a "huge gamble" for designers competing against thousands of others.

99designs' main selling point is exactly that: The company prides itself on its crowdsourcing business model, boasting of its ability to bring the client as many designs as possible from anyone who wants to participate. "A new design is uploaded to the site every seven seconds," says site cofounder Matt Mickiewicz, with "quality that I would argue is as good or better as any freelance designers out there."

Earning the title of 'designer' on 99designs is as easy as filling out an online registration form.

"It doesn't matter if you're 15 or 60," says Mickiewicz, making a case for merit-based design competitions on a leveled playing field. Technically, you must be 18 years old to sign a contract to submit work to the site. But 99designs doesn’t appear to be very strict about enforcing that. People claiming to be as young as 11 years old have posted designs. But the competition is stiff. For each project, 99designs says an average of 95 designs is submitted.

Design professionals do concede that the site is attractive to art school students and others just starting out. "The populist element is very appealing," says Richard Grefé, executive director of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, a professional association for designers. "Clients may be satisfied with that, but they're losing out on the full experience of design."

It's this lack of experience that irks designers the most. Clients post a brief to 99designs' website in which they tell the designers what the company is looking for, but there's no guarantee the client will provide feedback to the designers who seem to be getting it right. (99designs does encourage "continual feedback" between client and designers.) "The initial back-and-forth process of consultation between client and designer is crucial to the design process," says Grefé.

While clients may or may not be getting "Walmart-quality" designs, they're certainly paying Walmart prices. Logo payouts can run as low as $211, while a webpage design package starts at just $499--rates considered absurdly low by some in the business.

"AIGA would never come up with a piecework price list for design," scoffs Grefé. "It's a pricing structure that does not relate to value."

As larger companies turn to 99designs and the crowdsourcing model, industry professionals are paying closer attention, whether they like it or not. "We're trying to understand and respect the shift in the marketplace while still trying to protect the integrity of design," says Grefé. "It's clear that social media is changing the marketplace."

Contact the writer at misaac@forbes.com.