Crowd sourcing. No phrase makes more designers cringe than crowd sourcing, except maybe “angry clients with pitchforks.” For whatever reason, the thought of competing with thousands of other users for gigs, clients, and projects is totally appealing, to us as well as most other designers we know. If you happened to grow up and work in an age when your book was still carried in a leather chap with handles, we have a feeling you don’t even know what crowd sourcing is. But is this how it should be? Should all of us creative types be so terrified of the idea of crowd sourcing? To be honest, not at all, and for one very good reason: DesignContest.com.
The site combines the best of a traditional design runoff with the best of crowd sourcing, producing an experience that’s simple, easy to learn, and potentially endlessly rewarding. If you’re still not sold on the concept, don’t worry: We’re going to dive into the matter directly, but before we do, we feel we owe the elders and ludites amongst us a quick explanation of the crowd sourcing concept itself. So without further ado, may we present our full in-depth guide to both crowd sourcing and DesignContest.com!
What is Crowd Sourcing, Anyway?
To begin with, you may be wondering just what in the name of all things holy crowd sourcing actually is. (By the way, we’ve also seen it spelled “crowdsourcing” but to avoid any jargony turn-offs, we’re going to opt to spell it in phrase format. No matter the orthography, though, the idea behind the concept is relatively simple: In times gone past, you would hire a specialist to deal with your problems. Do you have a pipe that needs fixing? Hire a plumber. Have to buy a house? Get a realtor. Need a new logo for your business? Find, hire, and coax a graphic design firm into giving you what you want. But what if we took this idea of need-and-purchase and stretched it out over the entire Internet? What if it were possible to use a mountain of producers, instead of a single firm?
Essentially, this is exactly what crowd sourcing does. The whole idea is that a business can access a crowd sourcing site, start the contest of its needs (logo design, website design, t-shirt design, banner design, etc.), and then accept bids and proposals from a sea of Internet-based designers. From this slush heap, the original purchaser can select the best deal, send out a single payment, and then receive the goods. This cuts out entirely the need for complex contracts, messy payments, and long waits at the firm. It’s a beautiful system, but DesignContest.com makes it even more appealing.
How Does it Work?
By nature, DesignContest.com works in the same format listed above, but with a few important distinctions. First and foremost, not just everyone can apply and begin posting on DesignContest.com. All contributing designers must first be pre-qualified for quality, ensuring that the proposals users acquire are professional and of the highest caliber. This is hardly a problem for you, we’re assuming, as we’d be willing to bet you create truly top-notch stuff on a regular basis. If you’re interested in joining DesignContest.com, simply bring along a few choice portfolio pieces, and you’ll have no trouble at all.
Also in direct contrast to other sites, DesignContest.com does not work off of bids and proposals, but finished projects. The company in need posts a project and monetary reward. Then, designers create the project in its entirety, and submit the results. The company then selects the one they feel best fits their needs, and the designer is instantly thrown the reward money. In essence, DesignContest.com takes crowd sourcing and turns it into a contest—it’s like that’s in the name somewhere, you know? And, of course, with each contest there’s only one winner. So what does that mean, you might be asking. If so, you’ve come to the right place:
What if I Don’t Win?
Sadly, not everyone wins all the time. In fact, it is but one lucky designer who happens to pump out the winning design. Thus, what happens to your submitted work when it doesn’t succeed? In essence, nothing! It’s yours to keep, and as the piece was not paid for, there’s no legal implications or issues. In a sense, it’s like you never even submitted it. However, there is an upside to all this, and it has to do with your portfolio.
Every piece you create is worth something, even if it’s just as a showcase of your talents. Theoretically, every piece you submit on DesignContest.com is a testimonial to your prowess, and as each unsuccessful bid is your property, why not throw it in your book? You’ll quickly flesh out your portfolio in no time, and best of all, you may find working on DesignContest.com quickly stretches your creativity and limits in ways you never thought imaginable. Think of it as boot camp for your designs, creating stronger muscles, finished works, and honed skills.
What Else is Essential About DesignContest.com?
There are a few other important features worth noting about DesignContest.com. For example, the company manages a dedicated knowledge-base of design information for you to troll through, expanding your horizons with a better education. Likewise, there’s also a dedicated design forum used by other designers like you. It’s a great place to talk about contests or get feedback from your last project. Add to this superior moderation, a fully updated design blog, and the aforementioned pre-qualification, and you’re looking at a first-rate community of nothing but designers.
All in all, DesignContest.com is an incredible way to hone your skills, expand your creativity, experience new projects, and potentially win a lot of money for your efforts. You never know what doors will open with the site, making it an indispensable tool in our eyes. If you haven’t been already, consider using DesignContest.com for your next design project.
It seems that every day another article comes out telling you how bad the economy is. I do so hope that you weren’t banking on this trend somehow passing web design by.
A joint study commissioned by Heart Internet, a UK Web Host, and Design Shack, a web design blog, puts any hopes of that to rest. It found that 80 percent of web designers find work to be either as hard or harder to come by than it was one year ago. With less free capital to be allocated towards redesigning existing sites and the existence of more and more free options, this is a situation that does not look to correct itself any time soon.
The web designer who wants to stay in this profession needs to find ways to ride out this storm. Here are a few suggestions:
Write for new platforms
If there’s any technology that is advancing faster than all of the rest of technology that intersects with it, it is within the smart phone realm. New pads and phones and tablets are flying off the shelves. What isn’t flying with it are the applications and programming meant to make use of their specific setups.
This is reflected in another poll from Heart Internet which stated that only 50% of web designers consider writing their code for use on mobile applications. Well, there you go: start writing for them and you’ve now got a leg up on half of your competitors. Of course, this is a lot of changing standards to keep up with. It’s not easy; but in this economy, neither is anything that you need to do to stay ahead. With more and more shopping being done from a hand-held device, this is a swelling market demographic that cannot be ignored.
Fill in the gaps
And it probably goes without saying that this same rule also goes for all of the old services that you never got around to learning. Can you write for Unix, Linux and Windows servers? Did you learn Flash, Shockwave, X3D? Heck, learn Linden while you’re at it. It may seem absurd or frivolous, but those Second Life dollars can become real dollars, and who even knows where those are going?
Expand downward
There are many other options to consider. Advertising-driving personal blogs, accepting advertising in general, freelance writing, join website design contest website like DesignContest.com, even at home customer service; all of these areas are filled with employers who are in constant need of little bits of help. Those few extra dollars you make could make all the difference, not to mention the fact that by accepting more work you are continuing to make new connections. Those connections could someday be new webmasters looking for your main service.
Yes, it may feel demeaning to resort to this after all of your hard training learning PHP or other similar languages. Take a look at the world, though: you aren’t the only one having to retrain yourself. Be happy, as a web designer, that you can still make a living at all. Then, do what you have to do to make sure you can keep your career path on track.
This bookmarklet is perfect for anybody who spends any time working on web site layouts. XRAY is used to see the box model for any element on a web page. It will dim the area not selected, and give you statistics such as the CSS id or class assigned to it, the interface hierarchy, and the CSS code assigned to that section.
With that said, it is the perfect browser companion for people who pull up a web site and wonder, “how did they do that?” because it tells you everything right there on the web page. It works with Internet 6 and up, and every Webkit and Mozilla-based browser out there today (that includes Safari, Firefox, Camino and more).
To use it, all you have to do is drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar. When you are on a site you want to see more about, click the bookmarklet and the semi-transparent XRAY window will pop up with all the information you could ever want. Go give the XRAY bookmarklet for webmasters a test drive yourself (then save it for your own CSS snooping) over at westciv.com/xray/.
