Hey, what’s the best place to find freelance graphic works right now?
i mean online platform, like ** contest site removed ** upwork
LOL ^ Does that answer your question?
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This question begs a lot of “Depends”.
– How good you are
– How experienced you are
– How good your client relations skills are
– How good your business dealings are
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If someone is looking for “work” on contest sites, they haven’t been doing this long enough to have experience.
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Contest sites is freelance work?
No, that’s not related to the post. But every time I post, the message ‘contest site removed’ keeps showing up automatically. Do you know how to remove it?
This sums it up GDF position on spec work & crowdsourcing contests - #2
The words are automatically removed as we as designers don’t support or approve of contest sites in general.
Contest sites are nothing more than playgrounds for clients who want something for nothing, and they do a grave disservice to anyone who actually cares about quality. When design becomes a commodity you simply shop around for the lowest bid, you lose sight of all the craft and thought that goes into a piece of work. Professional designers don’t just push pixels; we bring experience, strategy and an understanding of how a brand lives and breathes in every medium. By turning our skills into a guessing game, here’s your brief, now let’s see who can slap together the fastest concept, you end up with throwaway ideas that nobody owns and nobody feels invested in. Imagine pouring your heart into a project only to watch it discarded like yesterday’s news because some client found a slightly cheaper offer at the eleventh hour. It undermines every career that has been built on years of learning, trial and error.
What’s more, these contest platforms encourage a race to the bottom where meaningful feedback goes out the window. Instead of having a proper briefing session, a back‐and‐forth of refinements, or even a handshake to seal the commitment, you get a barrage of half baked submission. Clients cultivate the myth that they can divvy up their branding across dozens of anonymous creatives until they spot something they like. That approach might seem cost effective in the short term, but it completely undervalues what it takes to build a lasting identity. Real design relationships are forged in collaboration, trust and a shared vision,not in anonymous competitions.
Everyone loses -----> except the platform taking a cut. In the end contest sites dilute the importance of design work and undercut the very notion that good design is worth paying for.
And let’s not forget the most glaring issue of all the majority of designers who enter these contests walk away with nothing - while the contest holder gets to ‘KEEP’ hundreds of designs it never paid for. Dozens, sometimes hundreds, of creatives put time, energy and skill into submissions that will never be paid for or even acknowledged.
It’s speculative work dressed up as opportunity, but in reality it’s just unpaid labour with no guarantees.
That’s not a career path, it’s exploitation.
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