Crowdsourcing sites need to make room for yet another entrant: crowdSPRING. The site is in private beta right now and is starting off with a $5,000 prize for the best design for its homepage. The first 500 TechCrunch readers to sign up here will get into the beta. (The public launch will be in April).
CrowdSPRING is very similar to other crowdsourcing sites like Kluster, Cambrian House, and FellowForce. It offers an online environment for people to collaborate and contribute new design ideas. Companies can set up challenges with prizes to see what the crowd comes up with. CrowdSPRING is focused primarily on creating logos, Website designs, and marketing materials.
“What we believe is that there is a huge pool of talent out there that is untapped and cannot compete effectively in a traditional model,” says co-founder Mike Samson. To choose the crowdSPRING logo, for instance, Samson and his co-founder Ross Kimbarovsky created a contest. After they selected the winning design, they found out it was created by a 28-year-old janitor in Ottawa who taught himself graphic design.
How CrowdSPRING differs from most other crowdsourcing sites is that contributors must put up completed works, not just concepts. It is not so much about people working together to improve a single design, but rather to put up their own work in competition with everyone else’s. (See my recent write-up of Kluster, for a comparison of how a more collaborative approach can work). Since everyone can see everyone else’s project, they are still informed by each other’s work. “A funneling effect takes place,” says Kimbarovsky. This avoids design by committee, while still allowing one design to inform another. But it may also discourage the most talented contributors who might value their time too much to whip up an entire design for free before knowing whether there will be any takers.
Intellectual property protections are built into the system. (Samson is a former trial attorney). Your design belongs to you until the company that set up the challenge decides to buy it. CrowdSPRING takes a 15 percent fee. The company is based in Chicago and has raised $3 million in angel funding.
Come up with a better Website design than the ones below and you can win $5,000.
Never heard of ‘crowdsourcing’ before. Hopefully it takes off, there’s so much untapped talent in the world.
I have known some websites who are using crowdsourcing to do software development as well. I would share a possible use case of crowdsourcing is in the professional areas such as accounting, law, financial planning, consulting, etc.
Nowadays people pay a premium to get such kind of services. In some cases, after you pay $$$$ or $$$$$ you get an answer of a simple No. From my point of view, this is rediculous and those so named professional lawyer firms charge too much for a too little job. This is a chance for us to challenge them.
If there is a crowdsourcing provider who can leverage all possible untapped talent in a certain professional area, you may pay $$ to get a solution, which would be a great money saver.
I would be happy to discuss this further with anyone who is interested in this idea.
This reminds me of StoryMash.com – same concepts, but applied to storytelling.
Seems like a not-so-nice way for a company to get hundreds of hours of free design work done for them by a multitude of people.
It would be nicer for a company to hire a good designer and work with him/her at a fair wage.
I agree in part with what Sara #4 says. However, the designs that aren’t chosen can easily be re-used (in most cases) by the designer for a later project.
Still, this kind of thing could surely bring about the same kind of controversy that micro-stock photography did.
It will be interesting to see how they follow through on the things they list in the “how it works” sections. Some very innovative features are discussed, especially about intellectual property and escrow requirements. Most sites ignore intellectual property. Nice to see someone take it seriously. A site that values intellectual property would be a good home for designers.
Markus (#5) makes a good point about stock photography. Remember the days Getty Images was the sole source of images for newspapers? iStockphoto.com changed that pretty quickly. There are many talented people in the world.
“Seems like a not-so-nice way for a company to get hundreds of hours of free design work done for them by a multitude of people”
correction:
“Seems like a not-so-nice way for a company to get hundreds of hours of free design work done for them by a multitude of amateurs”
I don’t agree with yongfook (#8). There are tens of thousands of very talented people around the world contributing to open source software. There are brilliant “amateur” scientists, mathematicians, historians, writers and many others who have made great contributions (another such business, Innocentive, is proof that in the field of sciences, this model can work very well). There are great amateur photographers. I believe the American Poet Waldo Emerson said it best: “every artist was first an amateur.”
@Sara – its true designers should be receive fair compensation for their talent and work.
This site allows a client to receive a good variety of designs (something you don’t really get with one designer).
I think the top 10 designers should receive something for their efforts.
Rina > understood, but I think you’re missing the point of this site. Contributing to an open source project (where the aim is to provide something cool and free for anyone who wants to use it) is a lot different to the purpose of this site which is for companies to get work done and then profit from it. A much less noble cause. I contribute to open source software myself (I even run an open source project) but this is a different area, I feel. It’s just a freelance site that enables you to compare and contrast more publicly.
The quality of open source software is high, not because of crowd-sourcing, but because of personal motivation to be involved with a project you have some emotional connection to. With this site the motivation is more monetary, and if we’re talking in terms of green, well I can’t speak for every designer ever, but pretty much every professional designer I know wouldn’t touch any of these freelancing sites with a barge pole. Better results are earned through creating a real relationship with clients, not being part of some online reality TV-esque design-a-website community. But then again hey, maybe I’m an old fart and I’m stuck in my ways.
But like I said, it’s a good place for students and those without clients to get a kick-start.
deadpooled at birth.
Erick – according to the company website ( http://www.crow...e/about_us/team ) Samson is not the former trial attorney, Kimbarovsky is.
“Ross dreamed about starting a technology business. For the past 13 years, as a successful trial attorney…”
The wisdom of crowds at work!!
Lulz. And yes, this is primarily for amateurs or beginners. It’s slightly more on the up-and-up than ye olde “design contests,” but serves largely the same purpose: free publicity for the company, nothing but slightly better chances for a small payout than the lottery for the artists. And more buzzwords dispensed by pointy-headed dorks on the lecture circuit and devoured by those terrified to see that the emperor has no clothes.
Sidenote: my brother, who works in construction, told me this evening that he had his work week reduced to 4 days as a cost-cutting move by his company. I can’t wait to tell him that idiotic companies like this with absolutely no prayer in hell of becoming profitable businesses get $3 million in funding. Thanks again, venture capitalists, for doing your part to make the oncoming recession even deeper and darker than the last one.
99designs.com have been doing this for years. They have thousands of registered designers and a stack of live contests and traffic.
Looks like crowdspring even sourced their own logo from 99designs back in 2006. Here is the link to the logo contest which they only paid $200 for Makes you wonder about their intentions behind the $5K prize this time around.
http://99design...om/contests/321
I agree, deadpool for these guys.
Good catch Mick. The way the article is written it sounds like the logo contest was run through their own site. Guess they didn’t want to mention the competitor (lolz).
Come to think of it. That’s fircking hilarious – Their corporate logo was sourced from their direct competitor! That’s really gotta hurt.
dude !!! $5k to virtually do half the work of launching the start-up for you?? no thanks. If I’m gonna put that much effort in to it, I’m gonna make that my OWN start-up. true, the probability of it succeeding is probably a few orders of magnitude less than getting picked here, but still, the rewards would more than offset this.
That’s pretty funny – getting the logo crowdsourced through a competing service, and then copying 99Designs.com entire business concept.
99Designs seems to have very healthy listing & prize activity judging from their homepage. It’s going to be hard going for crowdspirit to attract a reasonable number of designers — they only have two dozen submissions for their $5K prize! What sort of money will buyers have to put up to get at reasonable number of logo or website concepts of their own?
I recall seeing (maybe their blog) that they just opened their site this past week. Two dozen submissions in less than one week is not bad – and there look to be some very nice ones (and some not so nice too). The $5K is clearly to generate interest. Looking at their other pages, they don’t lack design skills of their own.
I am not very familiar with 99Designs, but I don’t recall 99Designs or any other companies in this space talking about some of the things that CrowdSpring is talking about. I agree with Antonio from a post above – if CrowdSpring is truly serious about making this a real business and if they are really motivated to protect the designers and the transactions (something virtually nobody else, including 99Designs is doing), and time will tell — then they may have something here. Maybe just buzzwords, but their materials on the site suggest that they gave thought to what they are doing and are trying a very different path from everyone else. Whether that path succeeds or fails, remains to be seen.
Ughh…there is SUCH a huge hatred for “SPEC WORK” in the creative community, and NO smart, talented creative professional who values his/her time will spend hour developing one of hundreds of submissions for some company’s logo.
Creative professionals are always being taken advantage of. The web must empower creative professionals, not exploit them.
Yeah, I know many of you will argue about all of the “out of work” creatives that would love the opportunity to compete to design a logo…but this is the very behavior that the community is against. Just search google “spec work” and you’ll understand.
Of course, for a small niche group of amateurs, this might be a nice way for them to make a few bucks with their photoshop skills.
The space is definately one to watch, however Techcrunch failed to mention with all their “revolutionary” hype that Kluster is a “me-too” venture and is copying what others have already done a year before. Crowdspring is yet another “me-too” company.
As #20 says, spec work is not a good business model.
Actually, this gets even funnier… Talking about “me-too”.
If you look at the new 99designs web site design they published on their blog back in January, then you look at this concept posted in the crowdspring contest, seems like one designer is also drawing “inspiration” from 99designs.com
99designs.com design concept:
http://dev.site...ntest-index.jpg
Design posted over at crowdspring a few days ago:
http://www.crow...ional_design_02
And the crowdspring guys have ranked it 4 stars.
The most contributing designer on crowdspring mr “ImJustCreative” has:
-submitted a total of 1246 designs
-has racked up a staggering total awards of 4702 dollars.
Assuming he spent an average hour on each submission, which is a quite conservative estimate by all means he made a whopping 3,77 dollars per hour!!!
And this guy is actually really talented… I cant see how he could possibly make a living working at those rates…
My company actually launched a similar website to crowdSPRING at about the same time that they went live, some of you may have heard about it by now, it’s called eLogoContest.
We are excited and proud to be in the crowdsourcing field, and in spite of the negative reaction alot of people have to crowdsourcing we have designers making a decent check every payout period.
Since we went live in April we have had over a thousand designers sign up and had over fifteen thousand designs submitted, not as much as crowdSpring, to be sure, but we are self funded (we launched with 6k in the bank) and are very happy with where we are at the moment.
Sorry for the extremely after the fact comment….
George
eLogoContest
FOR CREATIVE OR DESIGNER…!! BEWARE TO PARTICIPATING ON CROWDSPRING!!!!
TODAY I WAS CHOOSED AS THE WINNER ON WEBSITE DESIGN (UNCODED) BUT THE CROWSPRING CREW DECIDED TO SUSPEND MY ACCOUNT. PERSONALLY I HAVE UPLOAD MY FINAL WORKS TO THE PROJECT OWNER ON WRAPUP PROJECT TAB.
THEY RIPPED OFF MY CHRISTMAS GIFT!!!!!