Managed Crowds of professional marketers and designers can provide an exceptional breadth and depth of creative input, without the downsides you’ve mentioned.

As far as it being a great place for beginners to get experience, how exactly is that? Experience in what? Designers that participate in crowdsourcing end up just doing production for the clients that like to play “art director”, a position, by the way, which they have no qualifications for. So what is a beginner learning from them? Absolutely nothing.

What possible benefit is there in crowdsourcing for designers. It is already difficult enough to sell our services and get paid what the work is worth. Now there are countless people just giving away their services. That’s not helping things at all. f you work in an agency you will probably never notice how this affects the industry. Agencies, for the most part, have sales people and far larger clients with bigger budgets… But try going out in your own and it’s a different story. People are continually asking you to work on spec and and you just see more and more people going to crowdsourcing sites to get things designed. And the best part is that in their eyes they are getting work that is the same quality as a good, professional designer would provide. I highly doubt that there are good designers going to crowdsourcing sites to get work because every such site I have ever looked through all the work is garbage. And what’s to be expected from a bunch of people who are trying to get away with putting as little time and effort as possible into what they are doing since they most likely aren’t going to be paid anyway.

CrowdsourcingSucks.com

Crowdsourcing provides a quick and easy way for any new designer to quickly build up a portfolio. Professional designers can earn some extra side money by freelancing on crowdsourced projects. Good design is good design, regardless of how much it costs. If there wasn’t a need for crowdsourcing, then those companies wouldn’t be thriving.

I believe there is room in the marketplace for both traditional design firms and crowdsourced design.

I run a dozen or so startups and while crowd sourcing might not be a good idea for large corporations, website operators are loving it.

My websites sell products – people don’t buy because my logo looks pretty.

I’ve spent tens of thousands with agencies, and to be completely honest, I’ve had some kick ass designs that trumped them for $300 using crowd sourcing.

Business owners will always visit agencies, because most business owners recognize that they aren’t designers and won’t be able to choose the right end product anyway. Choice is the enemy, 100 designs submitted = hair falling out!

Dealing directly with thousands of small business operators every year, I know that the majority of business owners with physical point of sale will generally stay away from these sites – primarily because they don’t have time to mess around on the interwebs.

Nice blog btw!

do designers TRULY understand the target audience better or do they just think that they do? i agree that outsourcing to a designer who has no regard for the end user is bad, but how about outsourcing to the end user themselves?

That’s a pure version of crowdsourcing.

As professional designers, we may all have similar tastes, have been educated in the similar ways or subscribe to the same design blogs. Someone who hasnt been shackled by the incumbent design community may see things differently and produce a more innovative solution. What remains is to be able to define a framework and model that empowers more of these kinds of people to participate in crowdsourced design. And that solves the problem of “getting things done,” “revisions” etc. In a connected world, that shouldn;t be too hard. And if we are able to mobilise such a large movement, 1 / 100 doesn;t seem so bad after all.

it may not be great for us professional designers, but we don;t really come into the equation. if we solve the problem of renewable energy, we;re not going to mine coal just so that we can give jobs to coal miners.

i’m currently doing a phd on this subject, and as someone who believes in the potential of crowdsourcing, it is very pleasing to read such intelligent and thought provoking counter arguments. i will be equally as pleased with my research if i am eventually proved wrong.

Who cares about the target audience!! Clients dont have the design understanding so

they fall for what they PERSONALLY think “Looks Cool”. There goes the target audience

neglected yet again!