There’s their ‘get of jail free’ card. They can’t be expected to pay for what is, at best, a copyright infringement.
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At the very least they should report the supposed Designers to the crowdsource site. They have violated their terms of service.
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So, @revitalizerealty, what will you do now?
Are you still keen on using the logos from 99designs?
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I wouldn’t blame RevitalizeRealty for this. For that matter, I’d call him/her/them a victim in the whole contest, crowdsourcing fiasco. They first contacted an agency and a designer who weren’t interested and then, in good faith, followed up on a bad suggestion to use a contest site. They likely thought this was an accepted and legitimate way things were done, then reached out here for advice — also in good faith.
Even their subsequent response here about having a hard time finding designers, not knowing where to look and being grateful for a suggestion to look at portfolios on Behance was in keeping with the best of intentions. I don’t think it’s appropriate to blame someone for unknowingly getting caught up in a crowdsourcing contest scam. It just makes us look bad to blame businesses who get sucked into this, when we really should be directing our frustration at the contest sites themselves and educating people on how bad they can be and what the alternatives are.
Most people have no idea how to look for a good designer or who to avoid. Despite the role of designers being largely to help companies market themselves, we designers, as a whole, do a terrible job marketing ourselves. RevitalizeRealty’s experience is a prime example of that: one designer said the project was too boring to work on and recommended a contest site, while another just disappeared and didn’t follow through. I’m hoping they get their money back from the crowdsourcing site and that they find a good, responsible designer.
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You are right, @Just-B, I should not have lashed out as hard. My tone was rude and uncalled for. I know it does not excuse bad manners, but I was just frustrated, that’s all.
@revitalizerealty, I am sorry for being such a hothead brute. I hope that this discussion steers you away from such contest sites, though.
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They found this forum handy enough.
Looks like this forum is a cess pool for people who are getting logos done for a fraction of the actual cost - but then come here to get their feedback.
I’ve only been on the forum a short while and that’s a recurring theme.
They are in the business of selling houses. Surely there’s something similar the Realty world. In fact, there is.
- CrowdStreet
- DiversyFund
- EquityMultiple
- Fundrise
- PeerStreet
- RealtyMogul
I’m not being mean - but crowdsourcing exists in a lot of industries.
And surely being a realtor they’d be aware of crowdsourcing sites… you’d have to be right?
I don’t think this is true. The first time I bought a car I didn’t go to the first website I found and buy the first car I saw. I didn’t find 2 blokes selling the same identical car and then go to a professional car sellers forum to ask which one would be better. I didn’t then get told that both of those cars have been reported as stolen and that these sellers are scammers.
Sadly - the first search I got for graphic designer logo USA was this bunch of Google Adverts
WOW! I was not expecting that!!!
The biggest problem with the Graphic Design industry is that it’s not regulated.
Car industry is regulated. Realty is regulated. Plumbing, Electricians, Brick Layers, Crane Operators, building in general.
Any dope with a laptop and a cracked copy of Adobe can go online and stick a pair of hipster glasses on and call themselves a ‘graphic designer’.
There’s no formal education required - or asked for.
The attitude is my neighbours kids friend who walks the dog has a friend who has photoshop - they will do it and I will pay them $20.
It’s not the attitude of the designer. I don’t think it’s up to an individual designer to change the practice of the industry.
It needs to come from an institutional level. It needs to be regulated. It needs to be one of these jobs where you have to keep your credentials for designing by attending courses throughout the year. A practice most industries have called Continuous Learning.
Even in most countries to work on a building site you have to have a Safe Pass, a 2 day course to learn safety on the building site.
Bouncers (those guys that protect nightclub/bar doors) have to do a course and have a cert to say they are practiced in protecting doors and people.
Graphic design industry has been made a laughing stock - it is not taken seriously at all.
Here’s the rub though, you can’t work on a building site from online.
You can’t bounce a door from the internet.
It is impossible to regulate the graphic design industry, as it’s done online, over the internet, no meeting required.
It’s a sad state of affairs. All we can do is pick up the pieces.
I still trust / hope that it will come full circle, in the same way it did after companies started producing all their corporate collateral in-house by getting the secretary to learn a low-end DTP package. In the end business savvy worked out that it simply wasn’t working. Shonky low-end businesses will still do this, of course, but serious businesses that understand the value of communication, who once did, wouldn’t dream of going down this route any longer.
You can only base purchasing decisions for anything on price alone for so long. At some point, when everything you bought starts falling apart, you learn.
It’s a sad state of affairs in the meantime, but when companies like this real estate company get burned this way – a few more copyright law suits, fewer customers, reduced profits, etc – they just won’t make the same decision twice. As soon as bad business decisions start affecting bottom lines, businesses are usually very quick to rectify their mistakes.
Hope springs eternal – but then again, so does ignorant blind faith!
Smurf2, like you said earlier, I both agree and disagree.
It’s easy to find a designer if one has some idea of what to look for, what to avoid and how to tell the difference. Most, I would guess, don’t.
In this case, a recommendation was obtained from a supposed designer, which likely gave the crowdsourcing route more credibility. A quick Google search for “Is crowdsourcing graphic designers good or bad” would quickly alert most anyone to the problems, but not everyone is going to be so skeptical of things that they fact check everything. Maybe they should, but my point was in response to OVOAO saying this person was “a stingy, lazy-ass dude!”. A person failing to be skeptical and placing trust in something that seems legitimate isn’t necessarily evidence of bad intent. (OVOAO subsequently retracted that statement, by the way.)
What your search turned up is evidence of what I was saying. It’s easy to be fooled by these places, and I’d rather blame the perpetrators than the victims. If the crowdsourcing contest sites do anything right, it’s their efforts to appear totally legitimate, mainstream and trustworthy to a naive business owner.
I totally agree with you on the need for regulation. Most every other profession has minimum standards regarding education, experience and competence to be licensed, but graphic design, nope. Anyone can claim to be a designer and start accepting work on the contest sites (or most anywhere else). I’m not hopeful for any change for several different reasons — the internet being one of them.
Thanks for the response @Just-B and @sprout
How does one go about regulating an industry - especially one dogged with so many nefarious-ish (using that term loosely) - it’s a mine-field!
We could petition Google to remove adverts from crowdsourcing sites?
Would any of you gents/ladies be interested in starting a petition? Could use https://www.change.org/
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That’s a great idea actually! That deserves it’s own thread though, so we can crowdsource some ideas on what regulations would actually make sense.
Thank you for your insight. We definitely want to be avoiding any potential lawsuits. I can see that this is a very popular concept and on that search you shared, I even found one very similar to our current logo from the same search page.
With so many looking the same, at which point can a design be clearly defined as its own? The further I look into this, the worse our situation looks. I wish I thought of asking on forums for advice sooner before we initiated the contest at all. It seems from your other post that a lot of others think of forums as an afterthought as well…
I’m not being mean - but crowdsourcing exists in a lot of industries.
And surely being a realtor they’d be aware of crowdsourcing sites… you’d have to be right?
I’m actually not a realtor, but yes, this is a real estate company I work for which rents homes to tenants. I wasn’t aware of the crowdsourcing for this industry and it doesn’t really look like those companies really affect what my company does. I suppose a better comparison would be like when a potential tenant is looking for homes to live in and decides to use any website with home listings from all different agents such as Apartments, Trulia, or Zillow rather than contacting a property management company like ours which provides only our own listings.
We could petition Google to remove adverts from crowdsourcing sites?
Would any of you gents/ladies be interested in starting a petition?
If there’s anything I can do to contribute towards the healthy development of the graphic design industry, I would be more than happy to help. Please let me know! Thanks.
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Fully respect your post there. Well done.
There are plenty of logos that happened by accident. But even before the internet, look up NBC logo dispute with Nebraska Broadcast C (cant remember what C Stands for?)
Anyway, happened in the 70’s or 80’s.
Burger King is called Happy Jacks in Australia, as there was already a Burger King in Oz.
I have outsourced some logo work to freelancers in the past and found their submissions on stock sites. Had to fire them as Freelancers.
Why not post the job of the logo on the forum and pick from the wealth of great designers here.
I am sure you will get a fair offer and a great original logo.
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You’re fine, @OVOAO. I learned a lot from this thread and it’s given me a lot of useful information to do further research on. It definitely has made me think twice about using contest sites in the future and I’m trying to figure out the best way to approach the current situation my company is in now with the current logo designs.
Are you still keen on using the logos from 99designs?
We might have to scrap the project altogether but we still have to choose one winner and pay them since 99designs had us lock in our payment when choosing the finalists. I’m thinking we can still work with the winning designer to make the logo more unique in some manner by expressing our concerns to them. I want to believe they came up with the design on their own and the resemblance in concept from the google search results is just a coincidence. Hopefully, they will be understanding, but if not I don’t think I’ll continue to work with them or anyone on there. If it doesn’t work out we’ll just have to start over again, but this time I have a better idea of where to look and what kind of work to look for thanks to everyone here.
Again, thank you everyone for your input.
Nah they violated the agreement using stock photos. Get a refund if you can.
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That looks more than coincidence to me. I hope you can get your money back and avoid paying these scammers.
A good designer should be able to prove their design through research, sketching, previous interations that are unpolished, meetings, notes and so on.
Yeah, our sister company has a logo made by someone on Fiverr and I found the stock image of it very easily. It’s embarrassing to see and I’m trying to get new branding done because I did recognize that’s a very bad sign. Unfortunately, this has all gone pretty awry due to the logo contest and it’s disheartening to see that even there we had some form or another of stolen images and ideas. 99designs advertised we’d have completely original submissions to choose from… I plan on calling them today to discuss our concerns.
This will be the first thing we try if we’re not able to work with the winning designer to do something new to the current logo concept.
Thanks for linking us to the help center as well. I’ve been looking through those this morning as I check this thread for replies.
Thank you @Billyjeanplxiv. I’m contacting the designers now to see how they will respond. I plan on calling 99designs later today to see what they can do about our situation as well.
I think we probably lost money anyway, but valuable lessons were learned.