By Jef Tan

You heard it. Preposterous in some circles but a very likely (and dare I say common) scenario in others. Blame it on the slew of “creative” crowdsourcing that has cheapened our craft I guess, where someone from some remote quarter of Pakistan might be happy to do a whole design system for exactly THAT: Twenty freaking dollars. It happened to me just the other day when a local Melbourne start-up matter-of-factly told me that that the quote they were getting was $20 and $100 on the “high” side. This is Melbourne, Australia we’re talking about people. The recognised ‘Design State’ in Australia. ‘Shocking’ is the word that comes to mind (shocking being in the local sense, equivalent to “awful!”). One would at least hope that in the climate of penny pinching and whatnots, someone like that dude behind the start-up will have some semblance of respect for us in the craft, after all, where does it all start (and end)? In an environment that champions creativity, productivity, fair-go and mutual respect as far as professions go, surely demanding for something as important as the identity design for one’s start-up company beholds more value than just the price tag? Twenty dollars. Sheeesh.

Let’s see what twenty dollars can get you:

5 soy lattes
2 MacDonald’s meal sets (upsized items)
1 decent meal: mains+ beer at a pub
1-way taxi ride from Victoria Street Richmond to Brunswick, roughly 10km
1 new release CD
1 hourly rate for kitchen help

…and someone even suggested that $20 will get you a hand job from a desperate prostitute.

But you get the point. There’s a lot that $20 can get you but mate, you’re not getting a freaking logo.

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Since then there’ve been more shocking cases of crowdsourcing in Australia by notable institutions such as the Powerhouse Museum for the Sydney Design Festival who, after much furore from the design community, dismantled their $1000 poster design competition. Read more about it here.