#designsydney

Design Sydney has run a competition to design a poster for this years Sydney Design "week". If you want to see some of the design which are a hotmess click here. Sometime after I received the link, a few friends of mine had shared a opinion piece about the competition titled "with friends like these, who needs enemies" to read click here.

For young designers the concept of crowd sourcing and free pitching is most of the time a foreign concept. Straight out of design school, I got suckered into some free pitching, by a company based overseas, and I did it because. I thought if I did the work and they liked it, I could land a job and move overseas to work. I went from being a paid job, to being a non-paying 3 month internship (which is how long I could stay without paying for a visa - I bet they researched that).

Okay that was a little off topic, but you get the point, not a lot of designers don't like crowd sourcing / free pitching. I am not a really big fan either after the tale above. I've taught a bachelor course relating to ethics in design and entering a design competition pretty much is a very big no-no.

Seeing the previous year/s branding of the event I wonder why they've decided to go with a design competition for 2013. The sad thing about it is that it is being purposely being trolled. If you look at the entries, they're too bad to be have been created by a novice designer.

One person did point out, that maybe Sydney Design has resorted crowd sourcing because of budget cuts, i'm kind of up in the air. On one hand I don't really agree with crowd sourcing, but on another hand I don't really agree with trolling either.