reuber1
10-14-2007, 04:50 AM
The below address (de-hotlinked) is a lovely little design contest that I stumbled on...
ht tp://olp dot spreadshirt dot net/wordpress/
Whoopdy do, another design contest. What's interesting however, is that it was linked from an ad space on the homepage than none other than Computer Arts...WTF? Do they normally support spec work?
SurfPark
10-15-2007, 03:54 AM
Oh Computer Arts magazine doesn't even know what's going on with this site. Otherwise they wouldn't have supported it. I got a kick out of this in their ABOUT section:
8. Are you just exploiting artists creativity? We don’t think so. In this case, selecting the new logo for a community company like Spreadshirt should be an open and visible process. We want you to have designed something that is so integral to our business. This type of open innovation is becoming increasingly more common, read more about it here (http://www.openinnovators.net/), here (http://www.open-innovation.com/) and here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Innovation)
All designs except the winning remain your intellectual property. We’ve loads of prizes that you can win, and we’re working on giving the winners as much publicity as possible.
There are also many other logo crowdsourcing projects which do this all the time, such as wilogo (http://en.wilogo.com/) or zooppa (http://zooppa.com/), but we want you guys, our community to design our logo because you know us best.
The last line is a hoot. Don't they know themselves better? The examples provided that use crowdsourcing (most creative word for exploitation ever) are sites that also abuse their audience. The bottom line is this, to truly have an "open source" logo, there would need to be one logo that could be modified and then tossed down a chain of designers, each adding in their own elements. To have a bunch of designers individually attempt to re-brand a company isn't open-sourcing a project, its making them work for free. As we've said many times on this forum, if the users want to put time into a contest, its their decision. Its important for us to keep in mind that this is spec work, no matter what creative name they give it.