AnotherDesigner

While designers like myself often think of ourselves as the victims here, often the companies are victims as well. Many of them spent money, good money in some cases, to end up with a shady designer or agency ripping off work and selling it as their own. The client is not only left without a mark to represent their brand, having to start all over but they've lost the money they already spent and risk lawsuits for the infringement. This is another good reason to find a reputable designer you can trust. A local designer you've met face to face and know a real name and address will help tremendously as many shady "designers" like to hide behind the anonymity of the internet. This is also the reason why many crowd-sourced services and competitions have been caught with blatantly stolen logos for sale.

I really don't know. I don't use a lot of Google services.

Could someone here please explain why this isn't copyright infringement? Aren't they taking other peoples work without permission, scanning it and making it publicly available? Also, presumably all of this works draws more traffic to Googles website, bringing them profits from advertising? I can imagine if a company that was less powerful than Google did this somebody would have huge fines and possible imprisonment.

And please spare me your "information should be free" arguments or the possible "benefits" to society. I'm well aware of those arguments but current law protects the individual against society raiding their work for its own benefit. Its a basic foundation that so much of our law has been built upon. So I'm interested in things as they are now, current copyright law, and not how you would like it to be as an outsider that would profit from more liberal copyright laws.

When I finally gave up my Wifi+Skype plan for a cell phone with data a while ago, I went with a Nokia phone. It's stylish and affordable and Nokia is known for building things that last. The phone is great. But my feelings for Microsoft haven't improved. Shortly after I purchased the phone, Microsoft announced they wouldn't provide an upgrade path for Windows Phone 7 to 8. Then they announced they would release a mini-update to Windows Phone 7.8 for us that would bring some of the features. I waited six months or so for a tiny update and then they took it away and never released it on my phone. As long as Nokia is running Windows Phone, I will never buy another. And I certainly won't ever buy another Windows Phone anything again after the way they treated their users. I feel like my phone is running a beta version of Windows Phone and will never get updated to the real thing.

> On the other hand, I'm betting you'll have a hard time naming a company that had to pay "thousands of dollars in lawyer fees" for buying what turned out to be a boosted logo. You just take the logo down and get a new one.

It doesn't exactly work like that. I wish I could find my notes right now, I have a half-written blog on copyright issues for clients that I did a bunch of research and found these cases. Anyway, you don't get to just say sorry and move on. You're liable for damages whether you knew about it or not. You can, of course, go after the designer if they're not outside your reach (international or hidden behind an anonymous online identity) but it's a real issue. As a designer, I have to know about this stuff because I can be sued if a client gives me something they don't have permission to use and I do. There are, of course, a number of issues that could effect the outcome including if the copyright is registered and if they're willing to go through the effort to go after you but it's a danger that shouldn't be ignored. (I am not a lawyer. I just have a healthy fear of them.)

> The process you're advocating, with the specific bells and whistles you're mentioning, starts at $5000. No sale. Could you instead give him some advice that involves a more effective use of $500?

Not always. My wife and I are both designers. Many of our friends are designers. We do a lot of on-the-side work with small budgets that would give a much better result for the same cost. Sometimes one of us will come home from doing something during our 9-5 for a huge multi-billion dollar corporation to do something for a 1 person startup. Often the startup has more interesting projects and are much nicer to work with. Plus, I don't have to wear a suit, a fake smile and get patted down by under-paid security when I go to meet the CEO of tiny-startup, llc. And as a bonus, most of you guys pay in less than 6 months without having to resubmit form 41824817B with the new PO number to the department that never answers their phones. (I hate corporate work.)

> I'm looking for a hacker (ideally a unix hacker) who happens to have some design skills.

I hope you find somebody that loves your product to do the logo and don't have to fall back on the contest. Good luck.

I've wrote about this a few times on HN before. You guys like to downvote me every time I do but here we go again ...

Good designers, the ones you want if this is important to you, don't do contests. We have families to feed and bills to pay. "Winning" a popularity contest, not based on substance but instead on style, doesn't allow us to support ourself and our families doing our work. So, who are the designers doing these contests? Well, besides the large number of completely untrained laypeople, it's mostly students wanting beer money and portfolio pieces. And lets face it, most designers need many years beyond school before they're anything approaching "good" at their craft. Those years are spent doing grunt work with increasing amounts of responsibility under senior designers, art directors, creative directors, whatever.

My second point about that is how rare it is to win a contest. Designers know that they're often designing blind here. They could spend all the time in the world creating the perfect brand and the client could choose something else because they don't like the color blue or they're scared of clown logos or whatever. Point is, the client is often hardly objective in these situations and the designers know this. What does this mean in practicality? They are going to put as little effort as possible in to this because the chances of reward are small. Personally, I'd love to see the average amount of time spent on these logo entries. I bet most of them are well under 10 minutes.

Legal issues. I'll skim here because I don't have my links handy but most of these contest websites have been caught with stolen logos in their submissions. Companies have been sued for using these logos from contest websites costing them thousands of dollars they didn't expect. It happens and when the "designer" is some anonymous guy across the world, you have no recourse but to pay the fees, lawyer fees and then pay to do your logo all over again. Not to mention the embarrassment to your company when this happens. This stuff is very, very rare for clients working with designers face-to-face.

Lastly, when you're missing the face-to-face collaboration between designer and client, you're also missing most of what makes design "design", instead of art. The research as well as most of the creative process tends to go missing. The designer starts to view the client as the ones to design for instead of the "user" and as a result, the logo/brand/whatever becomes less effective. And you know what? A lot of important questions go missing ... like what are your plans for the future? What is your strategy to deal with your competitors? Even simple things like "am I making the logo for the company, the product or both" ... changes in company strategy are rarely mentioned in logo contests and this could be the most important question in the world. Logos need to be adaptable to company strategy and that strategy needs to be talking out between company and designer. Often NDAs are signed beforehand, good luck doing that with on a contest.