<story><title>A Call to All UI Designers: Do Not Play Skype’s Game</title><url>http://kaishinlab.com/no-to-skype-competition/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pixelbath</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;Designers: get over yourselves.&lt;p&gt;If you, as a designer, truly feel the work you are doing is better than a design competition, then don&apos;t submit your work to a design competition. If you&apos;re really &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt; good, freelancers offering services for cheap, near-free, or even free shouldn&apos;t bother you at all.&lt;p&gt;Also, &quot;keep in mind that you are betraying the design community?&quot; Design community? &lt;i&gt;What&lt;/i&gt; design community? The design industry looks like this:&lt;p&gt;1. Top-tier ad agencies/teams like Psyop, Leo Burnett
2. Smaller ad agencies
3. Freelance designers
3a. Unemployed designers&lt;p&gt;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&apos;t, it&apos;s &lt;i&gt;you&lt;/i&gt; that&apos;s the problem, not the designers submitting free or near-free spec-work.&lt;p&gt;Apologies for the rantiness of this comment.&lt;p&gt;Edited for typos.</text></comment>
<story><title>A Call to All UI Designers: Do Not Play Skype’s Game</title><url>http://kaishinlab.com/no-to-skype-competition/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>larrik</author><text>Am I the only one who thinks there&apos;s way too much similarity between the the RIAA&apos;s &quot;Save the artists&quot; screeching, and the &quot;design industry&apos;s&quot; &quot;Save the artists&quot; screeching?&lt;p&gt;Your existing business model is disappearing, and your cartel isn&apos;t going to stop it. Sucks for you.&lt;p&gt;(BTW, my wife is a graphic designer, so make of that what you will)</text></comment>