good design on the cheap: crowdsourcing design
I’ve had an interesting debate with some friends at early-stage startups about the right core team members to get a product started. Despite outsourcing channels, I think strong local tech talent is probably always essential for most online products’ early life. But what about design? Some services put design first (“it’s the Apple way, darnit”) while others say you can improve that as time goes on, too.
Regardless of your preference, it’s hard to find someone who is equally adept at everything from interaction design, to visual design, to web development, to flash design, to marketing creative. Sometimes you get lucky, but it’s tough, and frankly, probably pretty unrealistic.
Nevertheless, I’ve had luck finding people who are multidisciplined, but I still end up shoring up some of our needs with contractors. I find agencies tend to act really big and have costs to match (and don’t make sense for small startups to use anyway, and rarely even mid-size companies). Small boutiques are a better fit, but even their models require them to be fairly cost prohibitive for new startups. Contractors are a good route when you can pull it off, but I find that to be hit or miss, too. Sometimes you have a good match/partner, and sometimes you don’t. And sometimes you don’t really know until you do some work together.
So along comes Crowdspring (http://www.crowdspring.com) , and its predecessor, 99designs (http://www.99designs.com) . Spec work, priced by the market. The head designer of Mint.com (whose design I absolutely love and think is brilliant) suggested trying out Crowdspring.
The concept is simple. Propose a project (typically visual web design or marketing creative), write up a simple brief, price it, and put it in front of thousands of designers. Those designers will attempt to win your contest by building proposed designs. You then provide feedback to help the artists revise their work, and then settle on a winner or two at the end of the contest (the intermediary website takes a cut).
This model can work well for marketers and product managers. You get a wide variety of designs to choose from, and can eventually strike a longer-term relationship with designers that you like. I’ve created landing pages for 1/3 the price of other contractors. I’ve created solid Flash ads for 1/10th the price of other folks (with the opportunity to choose from 65+ different design proposals – whoa!). I also like that it’s economically efficient.
Between the two, I’ve had different experiences.
Crowdspring is a generation ahead of 99designs, but the site is essentially unusable right now (performance issues). They’re hard at work at making it better, but until speed improves, go to 99designs. Crowdspring seems to have higher quality artwork, and folks that are more adept at a wider variety of web projects (i.e., not just flash ad jockeys). The site tries to mitigate some of the issues of a short-term client/contractor relationship by having the client do more upfront work to educate on the brand, target, voice, etc. That’s pretty good. They also make it easy to communicate, rate submissions, and share relevant documents. I found it took longer for me to get submissions on Crowdspring, and only a couple were high-quality, but it also might be a reflection of my original proposed bid.
99designs was the first (from what I can tell at least), and seems to be more focused on marketing creative. That said, the site is very very easy to use, straightforward, and with an extremely active community. I had 24 Flash ads created for a few hundred bucks, drawing more than 65 proposals in 3 days. 75% of them weren’t very good, but I had 3 finalists who all produced very viable options for me, understanding our marketing brief, what are target was, and being very responsive to suggestions and change. That’s pretty solid.
There is a movement (quite angry one actually -- http://www.no-spec.com/ ) of people who are against spec work, as they feel it devalues the role of designers and is a disservice clients, ultimately. I think the subtle undercurrent is obviously that market efficiency will drive down the price of design work to what the market is truly willing to bear, and that’s an unwelcome reality. Understood.
Frankly, I think it’s a service to the client because you can try on various designers before you buy, and ultimately decide to strike longer-term relationships. Building a relationship where a designer understands the client’s needs comes with time, but it doesn’t mean it absolutely can’t work in the short-term. It’s a compromise that you make in the interest of cost.
In any case, I’ve found these services to be viable useful ones for us. I wouldn’t say they replace the need for designers in every situation, but it’s certainly a viable way to bootstrap your option and continue to focus your resources and attention on other critical initiatives.
