Casting a Wide Net: The Miserable State of Graphic Design Online

People are constantly trying to figure out how to make a buck, and how to do it as quickly and easily as possible through tactics that are a combination of spam and sheer odds. This trend has permeated most sectors of business online, but I was unaware (perhaps naively) of how bad it had gotten with graphic design.

First a disclaimer. I am by no means a graphic designer by trade, but I do work in After Effects (a program that allows me to animate graphics, and all kinds of other things) quite often, and get to interact with graphic designers on a more intimate level than most. I get to see their original project files for a national branding campaign and have full access to all of their work with the client. As a result, I have a pretty discerning eye when it comes to evaluating designers to work with. The way they present themselves to the client, and their portfolio online, is very important. Most younger, talented designers tend to have a Dribbble account, and as a result you get to see how they conduct themselves with their community, and what the community at large thinks of their work.

Now with that being said, I’m always curious to see what my community has to offer in the way of local talent, and I was hoping to possibly find that one diamond-in-the-rough student designer that really had a knack and could use some solid, paid work. Color me an idealist, but I was shell-shocked after I posted my initial listing to Craigslist. I live in a relatively small town, and by using Craigslist I figured I was aiming hyper local, especially with a niche like graphic design. Within a few hours, my inbox was inundated with vectorized-clipart “ad agencies” that were willing to create a “HIGH QUALITY LOGO/BRANDING/PAPER FOR COMPANY” at the sane price of $99. Many of the emails contained similar wording, and many of the same images. There was also a pretty large divide in the price of some of these offers. One logo would be $99, and another would be $299 for the same logo from a “different designer.” While this wasn’t shocking, I did recognize some logos that were stripped directly from other designers, and had their text replaced.

So far, I’ve seen a pretty good representation of what’s wrong with the state of graphic design online, as seen through the lens of a single Craigslist posting. I posted to a specific community, but was somehow forced into entertaining offers of outsourcing from “designers” located half a world away. I was absolutely inundated with mundane crap under the guise of different companies, designers, etc. So, back to Dribbble. An easy fix was to be had, thankfully.

Due to Dribbble’s invite-only process, none of the terrible crap I was wading through was on Dribbble, and I was able to search through my emails received from craigslist, that contained the word “dribbble,” and eliminate all others. That narrowed it down to just a few designers, and after I turned the search into a filter, I was only getting quality posts from my posting. A few days later I hired a talented individual who I thought was a local designer. It turns out part of the reason I was getting so much junk is because some bot is scraping all the craigslist graphic design links (and probably others) and reposting them to job sites. The designer I hired had no idea he had actually responded to a Craigslist posting, and he was located 5 states away. So much for my hyper-local search.

Before I had embarked on the above journey, I had checked out some of the other sites that are gaining so much media attention for their practices — namely 99Designs and DesignCrowd, which basically champion crowd-sourced graphic design. It’s a mess of a practice, encouraging designers to work for free to develop a finished, polished product complete with renderings on t-shirts, coffee mugs, business cards, etc. in the hopes that the “client” won’t just use the completed design without paying. If the fear of not being paid for work isn’t enough to keep you away, there’s also the practice of shameless copying of others’ work, which is prolific on the sites. You submit an image, someone else grabs it, traces it, throws on a hip color palette via Adobe Kuler and then they resubmit it as their own. It also cheapens the craft, and encourages disgraceful practices that force designers into working for unrealistic living wages (at least in the US).

It’s a shame that this is what the industry is coming to, and I’m sure it won’t be long before it attacks my industry. Hopefully bandwidth constraints stop it from happening any time soon, but I wouldn’t be too sure. And as bad as sites like elance, odesk and others can be, they at least encourage the somewhat standard practice of paying someone for working, which is a dying trend in the creative industry at large.