01 April 2007
06:09 am

It’s true, I continually hear about design contests, and receive emails on a fairly regular basis; I wonder if there are coding contests?

01 April 2007
12:28 pm

Coda, it’s a good point and I agree that spec work can be manipulated for freebies and therefore dangerous to design in general. However, let’s take the most prominent contest of recent times – the SA Blog Awards logo contents by Quirk (www.quirk.biz).

From the perspective of a business person who has very little design aptitude, this was a great place for me to see what design talent we have in SA, get in touch with some of the guys and put them onto jobs I have in the works that they would’ve never had before. So in my mind there certainly are big advantages to putting your work out there in this context provided it doesn’t take up ridiculous amounts of time and detract from other existing projects.

Just my 2c…

02 April 2007
11:16 am

Coda: Initially the ONLY reason I’ve abstained from entering such ‘competitions’ was due to the fact that I’m so busy with my day job that I actually have no time for anything else… now however I have more (and better) reasons to think twice about these ‘competitions’ – I agree with some of the articles that you might end up being exploited.

@ mike: I’ve seen most of the entries that you mentioned and I don’t think that these competitions really ‘reach’ most of the South African design talent – if anything the design industry should NOT be judged by these creative attempts but rather by the work of individuals.