Crowdsourcing (or, Why I’m Being a Hypocrite)
November 19th, 2008
Filed Under Design, Rant, Thoughts | Leave a Comment
Recently I was introduced to crowdSPRING.com, a crowdsourcing site for creatives. I even went so far as to sign up, looking through many of the projects thinking to myself, “I can do way better than that.”
I’ve got mixed feelings when it comes to crowdsourcing. While I feel it works well for open source projects and similar projects, I don’t think it’s best suited to graphic design. On the one hand, I can see the benefits. For the buyer, they post their project and get many options to choose from. For the beginning designer, they get exposure and work they might otherwise not get. However, here’s what I see as the big downsides to crowdsourcing: 1) For the buyer, the quality of the entries aren’t always the best, many rather sub-par from designers who either didn’t read, didn’t understand or didn’t get the concept of the description of what you, the buyer, is looking for in a design and 2) for the designer, your hard work going into a design project for an entry more often than not goes unpaid because it wasn’t chosen by the buyer, and if it is chosen, the price paid to you is often well below market value and 3) (this is the big one) I feel it degrades the graphic design profession and professionals who work in this field.
So why did I sign up, and even participate in a few projects, given that I (and others) feel pretty strongly about crowdsourcing and spec work in general? For that, I ask you to look at the current state of the economy. We’ve got an economy in chaos, rising unemployment, and a shrinking pool of work for an already saturated graphic design market. I guess you could say I’m hedging my bets.
Right now, I’m one of the lucky ones. I’ve got three steady clients that keep me in plenty of work and keep my bills paid and the lights (and heat!) on. One client is on the periphery of the construction industry, and for the time being, seems to be doing well, even expanding. While I’m glad things are going well for that client, I know that eventually the house-building (and commercial-building) crisis could hit him, and hit hard, at any time. This is what Ronnie Ray-gun called ‘trickle-down economics’. Another client deals in travel and incentive programs, and given that nobody has any money right now, I wonder how much longer his business will keep coming in. And the third deals in a startup VoIP/data backup/phone concierge service. I don’t have all the details on how well this company is doing, but they did just sponsor a NASCAR, so they must not be doing too terribly, or they have very good venture capital.
As great as my clients are, I know my income could dry up at the drop of a hat. That’s why I’m hedging my bets and participating in a crowdsourcing site, despite my feelings towards it. Now, I know there are NO!SPEC folks, and AIGA folks who will probably flame me for it. I’m willing to accept your ridicule. Because when it comes down to it, AIGA and NO!SPEC will not pay my bills. That’s up to me. And in an already sour (and worsening) economy, sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do just to get by.
Brush mania
November 11th, 2008
Filed Under Design | Leave a Comment
blendfu.com
Obama Wallpaper
November 3rd, 2008
Filed Under Design, Politics | 1 Comment
I’ve designed an Obama wallpaper and I’m throwing this out there for anyone that wants it in the last 24 hours of the presidential campaign. Several sizes available in the zip file. Enjoy!
Chicago Sun-Times to outsource ad production — The rest of the story
February 20th, 2008
Filed Under Design, News | Leave a Comment
Crain’s Chicago Business is reporting that the Chicago Sun-Times has decided to outsource its ad production to Elgin-based Affinity Express as a cost-saving move.
Here’s what the article, and Affinity’s website, doesn’t tell you about Affinity Express. While it is true that Affinity Express’ corporate headquarters are in Elgin, Illinois, the design work is outsourced to a design sweatshop in Pune, India and Manila, Phillipines. The work coming out of these sweatshops is substandard and awful.
When I worked for Kinko’s the second time around (around the time of the FedEx buyout), they had outsourced the job I had held my first time around with Kinko’s to Affinity. There was a procedure to input the order on their website. One of the items on the web form was creativity, with a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being ‘do it exactly the way the instructions state’ to 10 being ‘be creative.’ One memorable job was someone who wanted an 11″ x 17″ sign advertising Smoothies at $2.99. It was marked to ‘be creative.’ When it came back, this was Affinity’s idea of a creative smoothies sign: The background was a solid dark orange, with black Arial type set at only 72pt, and clip-art ice cream cones - 4 of them - on the left side of the page.
Hemingway Outdoors 1.0
November 18th, 2007
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I’ve been toying with a theme I found recently called ‘Hemingway meets Cognitive Combine I 1.0.’ I liked the basic idea of the theme, but I didn’t like the color scheme and font choice. So, given that it had a very permissive license, I decided to modify it to my liking for use in a project. I’m now also making this available to you.
The changes are simple: I used a bit more olive green in the page background, rather than the creamy color originally used. I also added a subtle background image to the header with foliage and plants on a slight gradient. As far as fonts are concerned, I set just about everything to use Georgia, since it renders beautifully and is available on both Windows and Mac, and even some Linux systems (At the time I installed it, the Microsoft Core Web Fonts were available to me in OpenSUSE Linux 10.2 as a separate download - I think Microsoft has now blocked this and now charges for these fonts). But as a backup, the fonts cascade down to Times, Times New Roman and as a failsafe, serif.
Another change I made was separating the comments and trackbacks/pingbacks on the comments page, something I’ve recently implemented on this site as well. In addition, if there are no trackbacks/pingbacks, that section is hidden.
I hope you find this theme useful. If you do, feel free to leave me a comment, trackback or pingback.
But wait, there’s more!
November 13th, 2007
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This is the miracle kit for every nightmare client I’ve ever had. I hope the do well with their 35 fonts per page, florescent colors, gigantic starbursts, no whitespace at all, and eagles flags and puppies.
Craigslist meets Greasemonkey
November 10th, 2007
Filed Under Design | 2 Comments
I’ve really grown to like Greasemonkey, a Firefox add-on that lets you customize the way webpages look and feel. I’ve installed a few of the scripts for various websites from Userscripts.org. Some I’ve found useful, some I’ve not and later uninstalled them. However, I never could find one I liked for Craigslist. I love craigslist. I found my apartment there. I found the job that got me moved to Chicago there. I’ve found freelance work there. However, let’s face it: Craigslist is visually ugly. Thanks to Greasemonkey, I changed that to something a bit more visually pleasant, while not changing the functionality of the site.
It was easy to do, really. I dowloaded the Craigslist CSS file, and edited it to my liking (with the help of Dreamweaver to visually aide me). I then created a Greasemonkey script to simply @import that style sheet. Now one distinction: I have a Linux box running a private in-home-only webserver where I’ve placed this CSS file. If you don’t have a setup like this, and most of you won’t, you could always embed this CSS file directly into your Greasemonkey script. Just remember to condense the CSS file by removing all line breaks and tabs, and just make the entire CSS one long line of text.
Luckily, Craigslist has made this whole process much easier than I expected. They use one single CSS file for the entire site, so I could make all the changes in one file, and not have to worry about loading different CSS files for different parts of the site. Other sites out there aren’t as accommodating, making this whole process much more difficult.
It didn’t really take much to transform Craigslist into something a little more visually pleasing. I tweaked some of the colors, box shading, and fonts, and I was good to go. For the more design geek oriented out there, I used Segoe UI (from Vista) for the front page in place of Arial, and Georgia (from XP) for the text, in place of Times New Roman. I have a standard setup in Dreamweaver, that cascades the fonts as follows: Segoe UI, Lucida Grande, Trebuchet MS, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; and Georgia, Times, Times New Roman, serif. There are some ambitious re-designs out there, the most noteable being from The Design Eye team. While I could have gone further, I decided that just a few minor tweaks were all that was needed to bring Craigslist up to my liking.
Feedback time. Do you think I should set up a greasemonkey script for download that would accomplish this minor re-design so that others can enjoy it, too? Would it be useful? Or should I shut my trap and just keep it to myself?
Alternate Photoshop logos and other nonsense
October 9th, 2007
Filed Under Design, Randomness | Leave a Comment
Apparently the Photoshop family of products now has a new logo, separate from the Adobe brand. As you can see, the new logo doesn’t exactly fit in with Adobe’s current scheme of icons or identities. No one is sure why they went with a speech bubble with a hole in it (other than it’s supposed to mimic a P, but you don’t really get that at first glance). It’s sort of nonsensical. Well, leave it to me to come up with some new suggestions for Adobe.
Those of us familiar with Photoshop know that there are a myriad of menus. And we also know that with each new version of Photoshop (and all the other sub-versions of Photoshop) it’s inevitable that either something gets added to the menus or the menus get changed. Why not use this as a positive selling point? See what’s on the menu!
As much as I love Photoshop (I’ve been using it since version 2.5), it always seems like a cat and mouse game between Adobe and its users. Times that I have worked in a corporate environments with IT departments, it seems we never really upgrade to the latest version until maybe a month or two before a new version comes out. I’m sure this is pretty standard with a lot of applications, as IT departments want to be sure there are no surprises, are notoriously understaffed, and in general don’t like to upgrade software. So why not turn it into a game? There are countless users still on the CS2 version, so why not rub it in? Tag. You’re it!
Now that we’ve covered sensible (if not unplausible) replacements for the new Photoshop logo, why not explore nonsense? We love nonsense. Yes. Yes we do. We also like pie. Yes. Yes we do. More pie, please!
Photoshop adds flair and accents to photos and other projects. ¡Olé!
UPDATE:
It was brought to my attention that the new Photoshop logo and tagline are suspiciously like the Bravo cable network’s own logo and tagline. See for yourself. Perhaps Adobe should have had the legal department give it a second look before approving it.
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