EDIT: Actually, I feel a bit bad for posting this - still, I do believe that spec-work isn't good for designers. Competitions aren't necessarily the most productive way to go about creating a new web design for an open source project.
One of the biggest common gripes here is the non-technical partner who "just needs a programmer" to get the project off the ground. Everyone bashes those types, yet this exact thing, except for exploiting designers, is on the front page. There'd be a riot if some marketer came on this board looking for a programmer, cheap.
Developers do speculative work for clients all the time. So, for that matter, do software security people, and the dollar value of an hour of software security work dwarfs both web devs and designers. But don't feel bad, because lawyers also do work on spec, and their bill rates crush ours.
Designers need to stop acting like some kind of special priesthood. Yes, people try to take advantage of them, just like they try to take advantage of everyone else. The answer isn't to brand every contest, audition, or consult project as immoral and exploitative.
As a programmer who founded a Digital Advertising and Design group this past year with a very talented designer, you couldn't be more wrong.
As a programmer, I have much more leverage when selling my services over that of a designer. There are a lot more "designers" out there than there are "programmers" and people use that to their advantage.
The fact is, you can go with cheap design because "it works" for most people (that's not to say it sells). However, with a cheap programmer there are a lot of the times that the code doesn't even work. That's the difference, and IT IS exploited.
Edit: That's not to say a designer shouldn't come along and contribute to this - I`m merely defending no-spec, which I agree with.
You can design for free, but don't do it with the anticipation that you will earn a living from winning the spec contest, do it because you want to support the project. This is much like a programmer would commit to an open source project.
I think you're overstating your case. So far, you haven't been put in a position where you had to deliver functional code of some form to win a bid for a project. Give it time.
If you're doing so well right now that you wouldn't even contemplate going out of your way to win a particular client, congratulations. I understand that's not an uncommon position for dev firms to find themselves in in 2010-2011. Just understand that the pickier you get about who you want your clients to be, the more work it will take to acquire those clients.
> If a designer is interested in Ruby committers and wants to make it look pretty, then have fun!
And if they're not, they still have the option of not participating!
That's what drives me nuts about all this "no-spec!/crowdsourcing is eeeevil!" chat on the Internet. Nobody's forcing anyone to participate.
There's a very (very, very) large group of people who only have $500 to spend on branding their company. If someone can't/won't spend $10k to a "branding agency", should they not be allowed to have a logo at all?
There are even MORE people who are willing to do a little work for the chance of winning $500 and seeing their work used by people not related to them.
Disclaimer: I used to work at crowdspring. I've literally seen both sides of hundreds of these contests. Nobody's evil and everyone participating knows the risks of participating. It's a win-win.
There is indeed evil at Crowdspring and 99designs, though it's not on the offer side; designers routinely submit plagiarized work to contests. It's something you always have to be on the lookout for and it's a major downside of using those sites.
Creating an environment where people regularly work for the chance of being paid, is immoral imo.
You can argue that no one forces these people to work - but that same argument could also be used by the proprietor of a child-labour camp or sweat shop.
Then why not provide a 200 dollar RFP, solicit designers that love open source, and pick the best one?
You gotta realize that designing stuff takes time. This means that there's a bunch of designers working hard for a prize that will most likely not be there. This isn't like OSS contributions where patches are integrated, this is direct competition for compensation, in the form of a spec work contest.
I'm pretty sure building http://rubycommitters.org/ takes time as well and I don't believe anyone is paying Aaron to build it. In fact, it sounds like it's costing him his hard earned "love bucks".
Get over your hostility and either do something fun on the internets, or don't.
I don't think I am. I never said Aaron and the potential designers are in the same position. I was merely responding to sudont's notion that a person's time must always be compensated by an up-front, cash contract. In reality, people spend their time on many things for many different reasons.
My understanding is http://www.no-spec.com/ is a reaction to businesses exploiting designers through spec work (if that's wrong, please enlighten me). There is no one exploiting anyone here, just a developer who would like his open source, zero revenue, app to look presentable.
A designer who only opens photoshop for cash probably won't be interested, but a designer who also loves to design in their free time may.
In that way, Aaron and a potential designer may very well be similar. They don't treat their craft as a day job, but more as a lifestyle.
The poster you responded to, was suggesting that a decent designer could be matched to the project before the majority of the work takes place.
This makes sense.
If you have a competition - the amount of effort expended is far greater, and much of that combined effort will have been spent for nothing.
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There's a commonly held assumption that design takes only a little bit of effort, and that it's so remarkably fun that little or no reward is required by its practitioners.
This assumption is wrong, and even if it wasn't .. what's the point in creating a design that stands a very good chance of not being used?
You're right that a competition isn't the most efficient solution from a total effort / end result perspective.
However, that's not what competitions are designed to provide. This isn't a corporate productivity debate.
Competitions generate excitement, stroke entrant's competitive nature, provide some openness (in cases where the public participates), and promotes more out of the box thinking.
You see it all the time with sports, the increasing number of hackathons (where yes, developers, designers, and others spend X hours building something nonstop for zero guaranteed reward), government initiatives (challenge.gov), etc.
Religiously calling all competitions/contests bad because there are some companies which exploit the characteristics of a challenge is a bit naive.
Note: I recognize that design is time intensive and not always fun. Hell, it's the same thing for developers.
i don't actually understand why this was downvoted. The point is fairly valid.
More to the oss point, if you want to really treat this in an oss sort of way, then fork the project's theme or what have you, make skinning it a sort of project people would actually give their time to rather than dangling a carrot.
I think the majority issue here is that most people don't mind giving up their time for something they care about, but most people don't like being commoditized.
Oh come on. It's a TWO HUNDRED DOLLAR PRIZE. It's obvious to everyone involved that they're not looking for the best possible design for this site; this is a satisficing exercise.
If you asked him nicely, I bet the prize would also be payable in the form of grizzled man hugs, a video of sweet karate moves or maybe he'd even let you get to first base.
Don't get me wrong, I don't know tenderlove at all and I've never even met him (or twatted with him on the twitter). But I have a lot of karma so obviously I know things.
Maybe they aren't the best way, but contests can make things more fun if you don't take them so seriously. I don't think he's scouting for cheap work to capitalize on, rather he's just looking to get the Ruby community's help involved in building a pretty looking site (hence why he isn't offering it on 99designs) and offering a prize to make it more fun.
Have you taken a look at what he actually wants designed? It's a single page that lists the committers. It's not a full site design, he's not looking for the world's best designer. I think he's offering a very fair price and the time commitment is low compared to true spec work.
I'm a designer. I'm against spec work. I don't consider this to be spec work.
Tried to bring the minimalistic Japanese feel to it, like Ruby is.
(The signature on the upper corner is only for the heroku preview. I wanted to sign it for the competition, but didn't want to write my name anywhere on the site)
I am constantly blown away by how overly complicated rails is for getting a simple site set up. It almost seems like this site would be better as just plain html (or a simple sinatra site...). But oh well, I digress, sounds like fun.
This isn't some guy looking to get cheap work from random designers. It's a core member of an open-source project asking its ardent followers if they'd like to contribute something, with a smallish cash prize as a nice thank-you.
It isn't different .. this is a request for speculative work - and they're also asking for completed projects up front (in the same way that 99designs does). There's also a very small 'prize'.
A web site that connects design & development entrepreneurs. It exists to make creating apps easier by connecting you with like-minded designers & developers with the same goal: create cool & useful apps. Build It With Me will help you bootstrap your ideas into actual apps.
Why'd we make it? Because we want to make it easier for likeminded developers and designers to meet and collaborate with one another. In other words, we want to help folks actually build the lovely projects they're thinking about.
EDIT: Actually, I feel a bit bad for posting this - still, I do believe that spec-work isn't good for designers. Competitions aren't necessarily the most productive way to go about creating a new web design for an open source project.