A Call to All UI Designers: Do Not Play Skype’s Game | Hacker News

As a designer, these pieces come off to me as whiny. I have a difficult time picturing why a designer would sit there angry at a company for crowdsourcing a design. Some 14-year-old designer is not cheapening the work we do by submitting logos for free to a bunch of companies hoping to get exposure. Out-of-work designers are not taking all the other freelance jobs because they decided to do some blog layouts at $50 a pop. Designers: get over yourselves. If you, as a designer, truly feel the work you are doing is better than a design competition, then don't submit your work to a design competition. If you're really that good, freelancers offering services for cheap, near-free, or even free shouldn't bother you at all. Also, "keep in mind that you are betraying the design community?" Design community? What design community? The design industry looks like this: 1. Top-tier ad agencies/teams like Psyop, Leo Burnett 2. Smaller ad agencies 3. Freelance designers 3a. Unemployed designers So who is our hypothetical 14-year-old logo-designing student hurting? Ad agencies. If your work is really worth that much more or is that much better, companies will pay handsomely for it. If they won't, it's you that's the problem, not the designers submitting free or near-free spec-work. Apologies for the rantiness of this comment. Edited for typos.