As an artist, I have some issues with crowdsourcing labor. Those issues are diminished a bit when we’re doing it for charity, where money isn’t our primary motivator. But “contest” type jobs are becoming more and more common as a general practice and they devalue our labor. For it to actually be in our best interest, the contest prize needs to be proportional to the risk of not getting anything, but it almost always is, in fact, lower than the going rate. $295 is in the ballpark of a standard fee, but still on the lower end of the spectrum
I don’t have a lot of logo design experience so I’m not personally invested in this particular job, but I’d rather the SIAI ask for samples of people’s work, pick a candidate with a proven track record and just hire them to do the job. Grocery stores don’t have contests to see who’s the best cashier and only pay the best one, nor do law firms or corporations hiring a CEO.
Insider info: This was tried. There have been e-mails going around with many many logos by a hired artist attached to them. There is approximately zero consensus and most people aren’t happy with any of the logos.
I for one would get some utility from any further information about what sorts of designs were rejected and why. I’ve been working on SI logos for much of the last two days, but have no way to guess if I’m on the right track (other than that I like them, of course).
That crowd-sourced prizes attract reasonable quality entrants at low cost is part of their attraction to those funding them.
Complaining that they are low cost seems fruitless. Perhaps argue that the results are bad for the money invested—if you think there is evidence for that. I don’t think there is much evidence for that, though—prizes produce competitive results. In this case there have been 20 designs submitted already. Update: make that 50 designs!
I’m working on a lengthy essay discussing this. It may not be relevant anymore by the time it’s done, and might not really be appropriate for less wrong outside of replying to this specific post. But the basic summary is:
Yes, for the immediate future, a contest with a $300 prize is probably going to be more useful to you than trying to hire an artist for $300.
What you have to realize is that when you have a $300 contest with 20 participants, the actual financial payoff to the participants is essentially $15. The amount of time it takes to make a good logo is variable, depending on whether you get a flash of insight and do the whole thing in 15 minutes or take several hours trying various ideas. But essentially, on average, you are paying less than minimum wage for highly skilled labor. Doing a good job requires not only years of work, but studying design and branding principles that usually require a college education to understand and put into practice.
I don’t actually know whether it’s in your (or any other client’s) long term interest to do this. We’re dealing with a complex system here with a lot of potential long term side effects. People respond to contests irrationally, and it’s entirely possible that they will continue to do so indefinitely and the payoff will always be worthwhile. But at least keep in the back of your head that what you’re actually paying is a few dollars an hour, and the success you get is dependent (at best) on young hobbyists who are happy to do the work anyway, and (at worst) widespread irrationality and poor math skills among the general population.
(Note: I’m specifically talking about contest-labor. There are other forms of crowd-sourcing that I’m less concerned about.)
Assigning $300 to your logo budget might be insufficient, period. I don’t know enough about SIAI’s marketing history to really judge one way or the other. The website design looks pretty solid. But I’ve seen several clients approach marketing in a piecemeal way that a) isn’t efficient, b) misunderstands marketing as a whole. And whenever I see an advertisement for contest labor I’m reminded of a few related ways that clients approach art badly. This issue is the part that’s most relevant for SIAI’s consideration, but also the most complicated and I need to do more research before I’m confident enough of my assertions.
I think there must be a lot of people who would like to work in their own time over the internet. I don’t know if they are schoolkids, housewifes, or workers from the third world, but—whoever they are—there seem to be a lot of them. What there aren’t enough of are enough opportunities to satisfy them all. If you look at some of the “hire an expert” sites, the prices seem pretty awful there as well—e.g.: http://www.scriptlance.com/
It does appear that prizes are good motivators—in comparison with a process involving screening applicants and awarding one of them the contract. Perhaps it is irrationality. Perhaps people would rather be doing their preferred kind of work—rather than attending interviews and putting together pitches. Maybe they are learning. Maybe they are padding their portfolio.
Whatever it is, prizes seem to me to be in demand—and so we can expect more prizes, until the demand for them is saturated.
There are three primary benefits of well constructed prizes and media savvy global competitions: they are a high-leverage and efficient investment, a powerful innovation strategy, and an effective change strategy.
I don’t have a problem with the idea of scriptlance (assuming I’m understanding the site correctly). The internet drastically increases competition and that’ll certainly drive prices down, but that’s not inherently bad. I don’t think there’s anything magical about the traditional going rate for artwork, and having a market that caters to those with lower budgets is fine. The bids I’m seeing are pretty low, but they look like they’re translating into something that you could actually live on. (Rough guesstimate is that they turn out to be around $10-15/hour for the lower end projects, as opposed to the $2-3/hour that contest labor gives you)
From the client perspective, there may be some quality dropoff to consider, but it looks like the site at least gives you some tools to analyze that. I notice a few of the jobs have a bunch of reasonable bids around the client’s budget, and then a lowball bid. If those lowball bids tend towards lower quality, you still have a range of choices and might deliberately choose something more expensive if you think it’s worth it.
I suspect the actual problem is a lack of a good “middle tier” option. There are definite benefits to having a long term relationship with an artist who understands your vision and can competently execute it. Websites that divide up labor into little outsource chunks will have a harder time accomplishing that. I know that from the client perspective, finding an artist who is worth having that relationship can be frustrating. The artists who are likely to be worthwhile also tend to command expensive rates, so if you miss you’ll be wasting a lot of time and money. I don’t know what the solution there is but I do think it’s a problem.
As for the X-Prize: I see a categorical difference between contest-labor and actual contests. The X-Prize gives you actual prestige and publicity. In a real contest, even being runner-up can result in publicity that can benefit you and lead to new employment. They also usually provide rewards that are greater than normal payment would be. (I don’t know how valuable the labor required for winning the X-Prize is, but $10 million sounds like a lot of money to me).
Low budget contest-labor, on the other hand, doesn’t give you any special publicity, and can actually harm your prestige depending on the circumstances, since it has a stigma among professional artists and sends a message to other potential employers that you’re willing to work for scraps. An important skill for young artists to develop is to communicate the value of their work so that employers don’t take advantage of them (often unintentionally), leading to a cycle of frustration and a day job at WalMart. Contest labor sends the opposite message.
OTOH, I don’t know very many people who ring up grocery purchases or manage corporations or law firms as a hobby, whereas I know many people who produce art that way.
No doubt professional artists with specific talents/training/experience in logo design produce a much higher-quality product than hobbyists do, of course, and do best not to participate in these sorts of contests at all. Even if it’s for charity, presumably a professional artist who can command higher fees does better to spend their time on better-paying contracts and donating the money instead of donating their time.
But if a client decides to go with a lower-quality cheaper product (and save themselves the effort of trying to evaluate ahead of time which artists would do the best job on their particular project), what’s wrong with that? There are lots of areas where I forego premium products/services because I don’t feel the need for the benefits they offer.
Admittedly, perhaps clients who crowdsource are insufficiently aware of the additional value they’d receive from a contracted professional, in which case it sounds like a marketing effort is in order.
I think your points are good ones. I would note though, that:
Even if it’s for charity, presumably a professional artist who can command higher fees does better to spend their time on better-paying contracts and donating the money instead of donating their time.
isn’t necessarily true when the thing they are donating is their professional work. The reason it’s better to hire a good professional is that the professional is going to understand things about design and communication better than the person trying to get the logo designed, including things like how to craft an overarching brand that sends a unified message rather than a single cool looking logo.
I realize it’s hard to tell how good a professional is though, and I don’t have any advice on that.
I don’t know very many people who ring up grocery purchases or manage corporations or law firms as a hobby,
Not a “law firm” exactly, but the prosecutor’s office in Long Beach, California is looking for volunteers to prosecute criminals for free. This economy is rough.
Don’t most people work pro bono as defense attorneys or for non-profits trying to fight for some cause? I’ve never heard for a lawyer volunteering as a prosecutor.
You’re right. Traditional pro bono work generally is undertaken on behalf of parties who are unable to pay steep legal fees, or else in order to advance civil rights or some similar purpose.
Prosecuting low-level crimes is considered one of the ordinary functions of government, or at least it has been until now.
In the modern context, I don’t think there’s necessarily a principled distinction. The Long Beach city government is probably being pretty smart. Still, in a historical context, this is a big change. In the English-speaking world, standing national armies are relatively new, and government-paid firefighters and police forces are even newer. But employees of the state (or the king) have been prosecuting crimes since (checking Wikipedia)...at least 1243 .
Yeah, that’s my impression as well. Then again, most of what I “know” about the actual practice of law I learned from television shows, so I don’t take it too seriously.
Your enemy is not the client; your enemy is other artists. They’re the ones glutting the market and driving the prices down.
The typical strategy for labor is to unionize to exclude competition, but I don’t see that ever working out for artists. It’s too difficult to fight scabs, and very few people go into art because they always wanted to own their own small business (and yet, they often find that’s what art is), so the level of business sense seems to be lower than most fields.
Of my favorite artists, most of them work for $10 an hour or less most of the time. I don’t know the exact numbers for the pair that is at the top of their field, but I put p=.99 that together they’re pulling in less than $100k and put p=.8 that, combined, they’re working at least 80 hours a week. That is to say, I’m fairly certain that they’re working for less than $25 an hour, despite being a fantastic combination of talent and experience. With art/fiction, you are a success if you manage to pay the bills with just your creative work. The reasons for that are pretty deep, and so unfortunately are hard to change.
It does suck that the internet means I have to compete with thousands (millions?) of people across the globe. And you’re right, that’s not the client’s fault. New, cheaper technology makes it easier and easier to become an artist who can at least put together something decent. But I recognize that that’s just the economic reality.
The reason I’m so vocally opposed to contest-labor, and why I think artists should show solidarity whenever possible against it, is that it’s dishonest. Yes, technically all the rules are there in writing. But people see a payment tag of $300 on 99artists and think it means a payment of $300, when what it really means is about $10 (if you know you’re genuinely in the top bracket of talent, maybe it’s closer to $25. Dunno). Even if you know that it technically means $10, you have to constantly remind yourself of it. And that’s a wage that you seriously cannot live off. We may not be able to unionize to keep wages at $25/hour, but we should at least be able to unionize to prevent wages from becoming $.50/hour. Sites like Scriptlance, on the other hand, might drive rates down to $100 for a logo. But at least $100 actually means $100. I’m fine with that.
It’s been a while since I emphasized this point, so it’s worth repeating: I’m not actually opposed to SIAI doing this. When you’re donating time to charity, you’re not trying to make a living, you’re just donating time. That’s fine. But because it also reinforces the image of contest-labor = reasonable, and because this is a blog that is specifically dedicated to helping people make more rational decisions about economic utility, I think it’s important to emphasize that this is not a legitimate way for artists to earn money.
But because it also reinforces the image of contest-labor = reasonable, and because this is a blog that is specifically dedicated to helping people make more rational decisions about economic utility, I think it’s important to emphasize that this is not a legitimate way for artists to earn money.
I agree that contest labor is a bad idea for artists, which is why I voted you up. But I’m not sure it’s a bad thing for SIAI to be using contest labor. If you’re hiring, it’s oftentimes the rational thing to do. Prizes for creative work are also seen favorably by economists (particularly Hanson), and so promoting them may be worth it even if a subset of creative professionals responds irrationally.
But I’m not sure it’s a bad thing for SIAI to be using contest labor.
My point wasn’t that it’s a bad thing for SIAI to do, but that I felt that if SIAI is going to do it, it’s important to discuss the issue from an artist’s perspective as well. Without that discussion, the contest encourages both businesses and artists to participate in contest-labor. And while it may be rational to try and get as much free stuff as possible, it’s not rational to give away free stuff. Less Wrong shouldn’t be encouraging people to do irrational things.
Edit: in case it’s still unclear, I’m talking about Less Wrong encouraging (by omission of a more involved discussion) artists to participate in contests that are NOT charity oriented.
I also think it’s somewhat shaky to encourage people (clients) to do things that are only rational because they make it easy to take advantage of people’s irrationality. I wouldn’t say it’s wrong per se, but it’s something that’s cause me to pause and evaluate the surrounding issues.
For my part, I’m delighted to have the opportunity to try and create some distinctive imagery for SI. I’ve been fortunate enough to have what I think are some good ideas. And now I can be confident that SI will have a logo at least as good as the one I designed! Also, I’m using this as the perfect excuse to finally learn how to use Inkscape; that will be sufficient remuneration for my efforts. (I vaguely agree with the general point about contests tending to devalue labour, though.)
As an artist, I have some issues with crowdsourcing labor. Those issues are diminished a bit when we’re doing it for charity, where money isn’t our primary motivator. But “contest” type jobs are becoming more and more common as a general practice and they devalue our labor. For it to actually be in our best interest, the contest prize needs to be proportional to the risk of not getting anything, but it almost always is, in fact, lower than the going rate. $295 is in the ballpark of a standard fee, but still on the lower end of the spectrum
I don’t have a lot of logo design experience so I’m not personally invested in this particular job, but I’d rather the SIAI ask for samples of people’s work, pick a candidate with a proven track record and just hire them to do the job. Grocery stores don’t have contests to see who’s the best cashier and only pay the best one, nor do law firms or corporations hiring a CEO.
Insider info: This was tried. There have been e-mails going around with many many logos by a hired artist attached to them. There is approximately zero consensus and most people aren’t happy with any of the logos.
I for one would get some utility from any further information about what sorts of designs were rejected and why. I’ve been working on SI logos for much of the last two days, but have no way to guess if I’m on the right track (other than that I like them, of course).
That crowd-sourced prizes attract reasonable quality entrants at low cost is part of their attraction to those funding them.
Complaining that they are low cost seems fruitless. Perhaps argue that the results are bad for the money invested—if you think there is evidence for that. I don’t think there is much evidence for that, though—prizes produce competitive results. In this case there have been 20 designs submitted already. Update: make that 50 designs!
I’m working on a lengthy essay discussing this. It may not be relevant anymore by the time it’s done, and might not really be appropriate for less wrong outside of replying to this specific post. But the basic summary is:
Yes, for the immediate future, a contest with a $300 prize is probably going to be more useful to you than trying to hire an artist for $300.
What you have to realize is that when you have a $300 contest with 20 participants, the actual financial payoff to the participants is essentially $15. The amount of time it takes to make a good logo is variable, depending on whether you get a flash of insight and do the whole thing in 15 minutes or take several hours trying various ideas. But essentially, on average, you are paying less than minimum wage for highly skilled labor. Doing a good job requires not only years of work, but studying design and branding principles that usually require a college education to understand and put into practice.
I don’t actually know whether it’s in your (or any other client’s) long term interest to do this. We’re dealing with a complex system here with a lot of potential long term side effects. People respond to contests irrationally, and it’s entirely possible that they will continue to do so indefinitely and the payoff will always be worthwhile. But at least keep in the back of your head that what you’re actually paying is a few dollars an hour, and the success you get is dependent (at best) on young hobbyists who are happy to do the work anyway, and (at worst) widespread irrationality and poor math skills among the general population.
(Note: I’m specifically talking about contest-labor. There are other forms of crowd-sourcing that I’m less concerned about.)
Assigning $300 to your logo budget might be insufficient, period. I don’t know enough about SIAI’s marketing history to really judge one way or the other. The website design looks pretty solid. But I’ve seen several clients approach marketing in a piecemeal way that a) isn’t efficient, b) misunderstands marketing as a whole. And whenever I see an advertisement for contest labor I’m reminded of a few related ways that clients approach art badly. This issue is the part that’s most relevant for SIAI’s consideration, but also the most complicated and I need to do more research before I’m confident enough of my assertions.
In the meantime, I’m also reminded of this discussion item about branding biodiversity. The philosophy behind that is definitely relevant here.
I think there must be a lot of people who would like to work in their own time over the internet. I don’t know if they are schoolkids, housewifes, or workers from the third world, but—whoever they are—there seem to be a lot of them. What there aren’t enough of are enough opportunities to satisfy them all. If you look at some of the “hire an expert” sites, the prices seem pretty awful there as well—e.g.: http://www.scriptlance.com/
It does appear that prizes are good motivators—in comparison with a process involving screening applicants and awarding one of them the contract. Perhaps it is irrationality. Perhaps people would rather be doing their preferred kind of work—rather than attending interviews and putting together pitches. Maybe they are learning. Maybe they are padding their portfolio.
Whatever it is, prizes seem to me to be in demand—and so we can expect more prizes, until the demand for them is saturated.
http://www.xprize.org/about/x-prizes
I don’t have a problem with the idea of scriptlance (assuming I’m understanding the site correctly). The internet drastically increases competition and that’ll certainly drive prices down, but that’s not inherently bad. I don’t think there’s anything magical about the traditional going rate for artwork, and having a market that caters to those with lower budgets is fine. The bids I’m seeing are pretty low, but they look like they’re translating into something that you could actually live on. (Rough guesstimate is that they turn out to be around $10-15/hour for the lower end projects, as opposed to the $2-3/hour that contest labor gives you)
From the client perspective, there may be some quality dropoff to consider, but it looks like the site at least gives you some tools to analyze that. I notice a few of the jobs have a bunch of reasonable bids around the client’s budget, and then a lowball bid. If those lowball bids tend towards lower quality, you still have a range of choices and might deliberately choose something more expensive if you think it’s worth it.
I suspect the actual problem is a lack of a good “middle tier” option. There are definite benefits to having a long term relationship with an artist who understands your vision and can competently execute it. Websites that divide up labor into little outsource chunks will have a harder time accomplishing that. I know that from the client perspective, finding an artist who is worth having that relationship can be frustrating. The artists who are likely to be worthwhile also tend to command expensive rates, so if you miss you’ll be wasting a lot of time and money. I don’t know what the solution there is but I do think it’s a problem.
As for the X-Prize: I see a categorical difference between contest-labor and actual contests. The X-Prize gives you actual prestige and publicity. In a real contest, even being runner-up can result in publicity that can benefit you and lead to new employment. They also usually provide rewards that are greater than normal payment would be. (I don’t know how valuable the labor required for winning the X-Prize is, but $10 million sounds like a lot of money to me).
Low budget contest-labor, on the other hand, doesn’t give you any special publicity, and can actually harm your prestige depending on the circumstances, since it has a stigma among professional artists and sends a message to other potential employers that you’re willing to work for scraps. An important skill for young artists to develop is to communicate the value of their work so that employers don’t take advantage of them (often unintentionally), leading to a cycle of frustration and a day job at WalMart. Contest labor sends the opposite message.
OTOH, I don’t know very many people who ring up grocery purchases or manage corporations or law firms as a hobby, whereas I know many people who produce art that way.
No doubt professional artists with specific talents/training/experience in logo design produce a much higher-quality product than hobbyists do, of course, and do best not to participate in these sorts of contests at all. Even if it’s for charity, presumably a professional artist who can command higher fees does better to spend their time on better-paying contracts and donating the money instead of donating their time.
But if a client decides to go with a lower-quality cheaper product (and save themselves the effort of trying to evaluate ahead of time which artists would do the best job on their particular project), what’s wrong with that? There are lots of areas where I forego premium products/services because I don’t feel the need for the benefits they offer.
Admittedly, perhaps clients who crowdsource are insufficiently aware of the additional value they’d receive from a contracted professional, in which case it sounds like a marketing effort is in order.
I think your points are good ones. I would note though, that:
isn’t necessarily true when the thing they are donating is their professional work. The reason it’s better to hire a good professional is that the professional is going to understand things about design and communication better than the person trying to get the logo designed, including things like how to craft an overarching brand that sends a unified message rather than a single cool looking logo.
I realize it’s hard to tell how good a professional is though, and I don’t have any advice on that.
Not a “law firm” exactly, but the prosecutor’s office in Long Beach, California is looking for volunteers to prosecute criminals for free. This economy is rough.
Pro bono legal work (not in any way affiliated with U2) predates the current economic downturn.
Don’t most people work pro bono as defense attorneys or for non-profits trying to fight for some cause? I’ve never heard for a lawyer volunteering as a prosecutor.
You’re right. Traditional pro bono work generally is undertaken on behalf of parties who are unable to pay steep legal fees, or else in order to advance civil rights or some similar purpose.
Prosecuting low-level crimes is considered one of the ordinary functions of government, or at least it has been until now.
There are two implications here I’m not entirely certain of.
The first is that enforcing laws is not a “similar purpose” as above.
The second is that the government soliciting volunteers to perform a task constitutes no longer considering that task a function of government.
In the modern context, I don’t think there’s necessarily a principled distinction. The Long Beach city government is probably being pretty smart. Still, in a historical context, this is a big change. In the English-speaking world, standing national armies are relatively new, and government-paid firefighters and police forces are even newer. But employees of the state (or the king) have been prosecuting crimes since (checking Wikipedia)...at least 1243 .
Yeah, that’s my impression as well. Then again, most of what I “know” about the actual practice of law I learned from television shows, so I don’t take it too seriously.
Your enemy is not the client; your enemy is other artists. They’re the ones glutting the market and driving the prices down.
The typical strategy for labor is to unionize to exclude competition, but I don’t see that ever working out for artists. It’s too difficult to fight scabs, and very few people go into art because they always wanted to own their own small business (and yet, they often find that’s what art is), so the level of business sense seems to be lower than most fields.
Of my favorite artists, most of them work for $10 an hour or less most of the time. I don’t know the exact numbers for the pair that is at the top of their field, but I put p=.99 that together they’re pulling in less than $100k and put p=.8 that, combined, they’re working at least 80 hours a week. That is to say, I’m fairly certain that they’re working for less than $25 an hour, despite being a fantastic combination of talent and experience. With art/fiction, you are a success if you manage to pay the bills with just your creative work. The reasons for that are pretty deep, and so unfortunately are hard to change.
It does suck that the internet means I have to compete with thousands (millions?) of people across the globe. And you’re right, that’s not the client’s fault. New, cheaper technology makes it easier and easier to become an artist who can at least put together something decent. But I recognize that that’s just the economic reality.
The reason I’m so vocally opposed to contest-labor, and why I think artists should show solidarity whenever possible against it, is that it’s dishonest. Yes, technically all the rules are there in writing. But people see a payment tag of $300 on 99artists and think it means a payment of $300, when what it really means is about $10 (if you know you’re genuinely in the top bracket of talent, maybe it’s closer to $25. Dunno). Even if you know that it technically means $10, you have to constantly remind yourself of it. And that’s a wage that you seriously cannot live off. We may not be able to unionize to keep wages at $25/hour, but we should at least be able to unionize to prevent wages from becoming $.50/hour. Sites like Scriptlance, on the other hand, might drive rates down to $100 for a logo. But at least $100 actually means $100. I’m fine with that.
It’s been a while since I emphasized this point, so it’s worth repeating: I’m not actually opposed to SIAI doing this. When you’re donating time to charity, you’re not trying to make a living, you’re just donating time. That’s fine. But because it also reinforces the image of contest-labor = reasonable, and because this is a blog that is specifically dedicated to helping people make more rational decisions about economic utility, I think it’s important to emphasize that this is not a legitimate way for artists to earn money.
I agree that contest labor is a bad idea for artists, which is why I voted you up. But I’m not sure it’s a bad thing for SIAI to be using contest labor. If you’re hiring, it’s oftentimes the rational thing to do. Prizes for creative work are also seen favorably by economists (particularly Hanson), and so promoting them may be worth it even if a subset of creative professionals responds irrationally.
My point wasn’t that it’s a bad thing for SIAI to do, but that I felt that if SIAI is going to do it, it’s important to discuss the issue from an artist’s perspective as well. Without that discussion, the contest encourages both businesses and artists to participate in contest-labor. And while it may be rational to try and get as much free stuff as possible, it’s not rational to give away free stuff. Less Wrong shouldn’t be encouraging people to do irrational things.
Edit: in case it’s still unclear, I’m talking about Less Wrong encouraging (by omission of a more involved discussion) artists to participate in contests that are NOT charity oriented.
I also think it’s somewhat shaky to encourage people (clients) to do things that are only rational because they make it easy to take advantage of people’s irrationality. I wouldn’t say it’s wrong per se, but it’s something that’s cause me to pause and evaluate the surrounding issues.
For my part, I’m delighted to have the opportunity to try and create some distinctive imagery for SI. I’ve been fortunate enough to have what I think are some good ideas. And now I can be confident that SI will have a logo at least as good as the one I designed! Also, I’m using this as the perfect excuse to finally learn how to use Inkscape; that will be sufficient remuneration for my efforts. (I vaguely agree with the general point about contests tending to devalue labour, though.)