Trust me, we know what crowdsourcing is.
Your boyfriend is slightly misinformed on how the whole Pitch for Work actually works.

An architectural firm or an engineering firm has to earn their chops the slow way by putting out bids or "pitches" for incrementally larger jobs. You don't do the work on a pitch if you don't have the hours in your budget to pay the help to do the work. Nor do you do it if you don't have a chance of winning the job. The company I work for does 40-hour bids all the time. But we are almost always pre-qualified on large projects though. We don't lose our jobs if one bid doesn't come in and we already have more than enough jobs already on the docket to keep everyone employed. It isn't a pitch-and-hope-you-win or go-hungry situation.

Also, most professions that do 'pitches', work on a pre-qualified system. Only a certain number of bidders are asked for responses. You have a far better chance of gaining the work if you are only competing against 5 or so other firms, most of whom you have pitched against before, as opposed to a whole world full of people connected by the internet. Very very few of the designers on crowdsource would pre-qualify as designers even if a professional system of qualification existed, which it doesn't, which also makes the design field different from those others your BF mentioned. When pitching it is important to know your qualifications, know your competition, and know your budget.

The final thing I will offer is that most engineering, architectural, prototype firms are staffed by fully qualified professionals that know their industry and know exactly what the laws and rules of engagement are. With Crowdsourcing you are contending with the proverbial Nephew with a cracked version of photoshop that's lifting an existing logo or illustration from the internet, changing it a little bit and making a whiz-bang low resolution piece of crap out if it, while calling it a logo. You don't get a lot of that in the professional bid system.

Any business that can't afford to properly start up in business needs to reconsider their priorities. Their logo is the face they present to the public. If they want to crowdsource it and take the chance they are going to receive a C&D from someone whose logo was copied by a hack on a crowdsource site...they won't be in business long. Being in the sign industry, I've seen it happen more than once where a C&D came down after all the planning and printing had gone into opening a small business due to problems with the logo.

I wholly agree with what PrintDriver said, and I've removed the name of the company from your subject line so they don't get any free publicity.

Beautifully put PD, I think this should be a sticky.

For Architecture / Engineering there is usually a Monetary $$$ Honorarium for more involved design
Request For Proposals prior pre-award of the project.

Don't be confused by this pre-qualifying there is still a lot of work after the fact. Pre qualification is just a client exercising due diligence and from that you are selected for a short list from your experience methodology and references from previous work.

NEVER EVER would any Architect work for free, they are not allowed to by the governing body of architects in there respective state of province. They would be sanctioned and lose their rights to practice. There are design competitions but they are for publicity and then the Arch. firms make it up by a larger percentage fee afterwards ... believe me they WILL recoup the significant cost of "free" design work

That's why you see a lot of these "crowd sourced" or "competitions"... Just another way for unscrupulous clients to hose rip off and generally abuse the graphic design professionals.

If clients were to pre-qualify graphics designers before awarding projects, there would be a lot of wanna-be's out of work. I wish clients would be more ethical in that way.

Another consideration is that the potential returns those architects and engineers and such are vying for are in the tens or hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Your average crowdsource logo might garner a hundred bucks on a good day.

Might try crowdsource a house.

Brief:

House, 4 bedrooms, 4 ensuites. Large garden, patio decking area, hottub on patio, rotisserie chicken a plus.

Houses I like



Colour scheme
Blue, Gold, Black

Prize for best offer €150.

^ Oh, and you have to build it too.

^ of course

Frank Lloyd Wright never crowdsourced Hank, especially the "Falling Water House"
His client was happy to PAY!

Boooo! I'll target some Architect Students and get 1000's of potential designs AND construction that I need for the price I asked for.

Paying for something as simple as a house, c'mon, houses date back to the time of cavemen, and interconnecting rooms date back as early as the 12th century. It's easily done and don't see why I should have to pay over the odds for something that man has been able to accomplish for centuries.

I've got a house I'd be glad to sell you. (Just try not to mind the angry folks that will eventually show up using confusing legal mumbo-jumbo like "I own this already. It's not yours.")

Not to threadjack... but we went to Fallingwater a couple years ago. I never had an interest in architecture until then. If you ever get the chance, don't miss it...

"It's that easy!"

http://tinyurl.com/6l2fls3

Fallingwater is awesome. We have a couple FLW homes here in St. Louis, they're spectacular.

This is the first one Wright built in the area, for the Kraus family: http://www.pbase.com/weed30/frank_ll...se_st_louis_mo