Designs on the crowd
By Simon Fuller. Many heads. Stuck for a new logo for your brand? Well, there are probably a hundred designers waiting to help you on crowdSPRING.
The creative marketplace is based on a pretty simple idea, one that riffs on the recent trend for crowdsourcing – the act of taking tasks usually performed in-house and outsourcing them to a community of people online. Companies, or people, can simply post their project specifications and wait for the flood of ideas.
After the designs come rolling in from the creatives on the site – crowdSPRING estimates that each project will generate around 80 ideas in response – the buyer can pick the best ones, and then pay the provider.
The site had its genesis in 2006 when its founders, Ross Kimbarovsky and Mike Samson, noticed crowdsourcing beginning to take off. CrowdSPRING has since worked with thousands of businesses, along with brands such as Forbes and LG.
“crowdSPRING lets buyers specify what they want, name their own price, and decide the length of their project,” says Kimbarovsky. “We provide tools for payment, intellectual property protection, project management, communication, file-handling and payment services.”
It’s a move away from the traditional system of outsourcing design solutions, in which people bid on the work in response to buyer proposals. With crowdSPRING, buyers choose from actual designs on the site.
“We aren’t simply a freelance marketplace, rather we allow businesses to post projects and view an assortment of ideas, as opposed to a variety of bids,” says Kimbarovsky. “By providing a level playing field for creatives, where success is based solely on talent and not resumé, experience, education, or fancy offices, crowdSPRING has opened incredible opportunities to creatives around the world who previously had few opportunities to compete in the traditional creative industries. And by promoting community building, sharing and education, crowdSPRING has empowered its community of creatives to compete on a global scale.”
And it is truly global, with designers hailing from some 40 countries, and working on everything from Tee shirts to websites.
“The reason crowdSPRING is building steam is the simple premise that two heads – or hundreds, as the case may be in our crowdsourcing business model – are better than one,” says Kimbarovsky. “While traditional freelance marketplaces have given small businesses access to thousands of providers around the world, all businesses get in return are bids and proposals. Now crowdSPRING lets small businesses tap into the collective power of crowdsourcing to build their brand.”
