The Cost of Vision

I recently attended a lunch presentation by a prominent investor in New York’s startup scene, and he got remarkably animated when crowdsourcing came up. Part of his lecture was an account of an entrepreneur who wanted a logo on the cheap. Instead of finding a designer, negotiating price, and critiquing endless revisions, the founder offered a bounty of $300 on a spec design site, and waited. Within hours, according to the story, he had over 200 logo candidates, from designers all over the world.

There are two problems with this process. First, it exploits designers. One lucky designer got three hundred bucks, and the vast remainder got nothing more than a “no thanks.” Horror stories abound, however, about undervalued designers—here’s one: in 1971, Carolyn Davidson was paid $35 for the Nike swoosh—this is not a new thing, and I don’t think it’s the issue in this story.

The more troubling problem with spec sites is that the problem-solving and curatorial processes that traditionally belonged to the designer are shifted to the client.

When Paul Rand was asked to design a logo for Next Computer, he said his job was to solve the problem to the best of his ability. The deliverable was not a buffet of choices or a palette of options, but a single solution to the problem at hand. (Steve Jobs talks about the experience of working with Rand in this interview.)

The designer’s job is to immerse herself in the problem, distill it to its essence, and unearth the elegant solution. Only one part of the designer’s job is to push pixels in Illustrator. Equally important, and equally lacking from spec sites, are problem solving and curation. What use is it to be presented with a couple hundred similarly mediocre logotypes? How do you select the best one? Do you let the crowd pick? Design by committee is an anti-pattern that can only find local maxima. You need a visionary to reach the summit.