"#1 in Logo Design Bidding - 99designs.ca/Logo-Design - Our Designers Compete To Design Your Top Logo. You Pick the Winner!"
The newest online business trend is Design Bidding and it sickens me just how extreme it has gone. Essentially you compete against other designers in a desperate race between quality and price. As a result, design is cheapened to mere visuals that look cool but do nothing for the client. Ultimately, people are floundering about looking for ways to cheapen themselves, tearing themselves and each other apart. What we need is collaboration, not competition. It is the very essence of why you hired an agency to cover your branding and design needs and not your cousin's younger brother who knows some photoshop comand keys.
At the expense of sounding bitter I cannot stress this point enough.
I can tolerate the mildness of certain freelance websites such as Elance.com where freelancers can offer their services by bidding a cost against other professionals for the same job. Whichever the client prefers based on the professional's portfolio weighed against cost, gets the job. Its a more controlled facsimile to real life. But even in an environment like Elance, a lot of the professional's rights are denied and when I weigh that against the benefits of the exposure... at the end of the day, its not as beneficial as they make it sound.
What I can't tolerate however is hundreds of designers feeling so desperate that they would design a logo for you (which essentially is the biggest part of your branding), enter it blindly into a competition against other similar "designers" without knowing anything about you or your business and crossing their fingers that they might make 50 bucks!
Do you think Pepsi payed 50 bucks for their logo?
This brings me once again back to my previous post. A bad designer offers you 100 different designs to choose from. Maybe someone who can doodle 100 different doodles and put your name next to it can offer you that kind of variety but in the world of design, less is always more.
A good designer listens to your wants and weighs them against your needs. A great designer will rush through all those hundred options in their head and meticulously pick out the most solid of concepts that fit your needs. A designer is not only measured by the visual, but most importantly by his/her ability to coordinate your access to the outside world. In many ways, when assessing whether or not you have hired a good designer - whether it be freelanced or fully employed - its what you don't see that matters most and I can guarantee you, that is where most of the effort goes.
So hopefully to rest my point once and for all...
Its only with collaboration will we ever truely achieve greatness.
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