Is crowdsourcing dangerous to the design profession?

No!Spec is a well-known movement among graphic designers who dislike the notion of speculative work. And yet thousands of designers at both the professional and amateur level participate in speculative contents every day, and their numbers are growing. 37Signals has an interesting take from crowdSPRING co-founder Ross Kimbarovsky in which he argues, in part:

"The establishment has long held that these ‘amateurs’ – students and stay-at-home moms, freelancers and fed-up corporate refugees – are nothing more than a novelty and are not capable of competing with the ‘professionals.’ The establishment is wrong. The Internet has blurred the boundaries between professionals and non-professionals. The underdogs are challenging tradition in industry after industry. They are risk takers. They are true entrepreneurs. The underdogs compete on their ideas and their work, not education, training, and fancy offices. They make things they like and they hope that other people will like them too.The underdogs are a threat to AIGA and the NO!SPEC campaign. There are millions of them. They demand that a level playing field be created to allow them to compete. They demand the democratization of the design industry."

Incendiary stuff. He then goes on to say, "We’ve created a level playing field where experience doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is your work." Now that feels like an oxymoron. Most professional designers (including this one) would argue that experience informs your work. But more than that, it disregards the rest of what makes good design: context, relationships, research, and in-depth understanding of the client and their goals.

And this is evidenced by Kimbarovsky's disclosure that "Our overall average across all projects is about $350." For an independent creative getting paid, say $50 an hour (a very low number, given the overhead required to sustain an independent business), this means a 7-hour project. Seven hours for adminsitrative tasks, market and client research, concepting and sketching, production, and revisions. Really? It would take a highly skilled and experienced designer to produce a good-looking and effective logo, website, brochure, etc in that amount of time.

There's a lot more to say about this subject, and I'll explore some of it later in an upcoming installment of Copyrights and Wrongs (first, though, I'll be looking at the contract negotation process).