Tutorial Intro Design Contest?

[Alperen T. ayhan]

[David Roth Weiss] “Oh, I respect the decision, but I have a hard time respecting the whiners who made it necessary. Writers produce full-blown 120-page motion picture scripts for some competitions, so Ron’s initial idea for a competition isn’t exactly without precedent.”

Yeah, exactly I agree with you… This would be just a funny contest, not ambitious(or greedy) I think.. and I don’t think CreativeCow makes “crowd-sourcing”, It’s the one of the huge community that serves encouragement for all beginner and professional people.. Money is not everything!.. as John said “upload it and if you like it, feel free to use it. I’ve gotten way more than 5000 dollars worth of value from your site.” This is priceless for me too…

Alperen T. AYHAN
http://www.produck.net
Always cinema…

[Steven Kutny]

I just want to be clear that when I received your newsletter outlining the tutorial contest I was genuinely excited about creating something fun and cool for an online community I’ve respected for almost 10 years. A grand prize is always great but that was hardly a motivator for me. For anybody to complain about the ethics of a competition is absolutely ridiculous and should not ruin it for every other artist out there. I still don’t understand this decision but please keep me posted on if and when we can upload our work. This was supposed to be a fun project that we as a community could laugh at and enjoy.

Steve

Steven Kutny
Digital Artist
http://www.stevenkutny.com

[Walter Soyka]

[David Roth Weiss] “Typically, no matter what the competition, those who produce the winning effort are rewarded, those who don’t are happy to have tried their best. I’m disappointed that some of our Cows think they’re different or better than that.”

David, when you produce a corporate communications video, do you guess at what the client needs, do all the work, and then try to convince the client to buy it? If they don’t buy, are you happy to have tried your best?

Or perhaps you prefer to work with your client, uncover their needs, develop a solution and a budget that address client needs, execute your solution, and do an iteration or two with the client’s feedback to improve the work before delivering it?

I was not one of the folks who wrote in complaining about the contest, but crowd-sourcing, design contests, and spec work are hot topics in the design industry. There are a lot of designers and organizations who very reasonably believe that spec work is bad for the industry, both on the client side and the agency/designer side.

Designers who participate in spec work contests are not very different from video producers who underprice because they don’t understand their true costs. In both cases, people work below cost, creating unreasonably and unsustainably low pricing expectations for clients. In the case of spec work, they are not only devaluing the product, but they are also skipping the part of the design process that actually adds value for the client.

That’s my problem with most so-called design contests — they short-circuit the design process. Just like video production, design may be a product from the client’s point of view, but it’s a process from the designer’s point of view. Good design comes from research, dialogue, and collaboration between the client and the designer. Contest winners tend to be pretty pictures. If they address all of the client’s communication or branding needs (both stated and yet-to-be-discovered), it’s usually accidental because there is no opportunity to work together to arrive at the best solution.

Personally, I was looking forward to seeing the details on the COW contest, and I’d agree that it was totally unfair for people to complain about it before they were released.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
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