Sergeant Major Cock up

There has been a bit of a firestorm over at How, a 'design' magazine that really isn't that much about design at all. In fact, if they called it 'US Artworker' then that would be a more accurate reflection of its process obsessed and 'inspiration devoid' publication.

Like most magazines, they like to have healthy dialogue with their subscribers, and bombard them with emails all week, usually to try and flog of a few places in some "webinar" on such indispensable topics like "10 freelancing tips you must know!" or 'how to control the money situation with clients". Something where the advice 'dont bullshit them' and engage in "plain talking about money and stop being a whimp about what you charge" would suffice.

Anyway, in some major stuff up, they decide to run an email campaign from one of their advertisers, iStockPhoto, the photo library that clients love (because they're cheap) but designers hate because you have to wade through a lot of crap and their watermarks are a bugger to get rid of for your mockups.

Istock, are now looking at crowd sourcing logos. Originally they crowd sourced photos, before account managers had even dreamt up their latest wank-term. People would upload their images and would receive a payment for each one sold. Now they're asking for designers to send in logo designs and they'll flog them as stock. This is great for Clients, who now have a choice between dealing with some flannel shirted poser with a trucker cap and surly attitude..or dealing with a stock company and getting their new identity within the hour. This is also better than the clients usual choice 'nephew with a pirate copy of photoshop'.

Now this sort of 'farmed out' design work really gets up designers noses. They hate seeing their 'work' devalued to the point where they think they'll going to be replaced by a stock library (or a clients nephew with a pirate version of photoshop). They also hate crowdsourcing and sites like crowdspring, a site poor clients and shysters from an MBA course try to get really poor design work done for not much money.

With all this animosity towards what designers feel as threats to their profession. How magazine, in a genius bit foot-shooting, decided to send out an email...too all their designer subscribers, advertising iStocks new logo service with a call to action

"Starting in 2010 iStockphoto will start selling a whole new type of file: logos. But before we start selling, we're looking for designs from creatives like you. As a designer, you've probably created hundreds of different logos over the course of your career and now you can sell them to the world's largest community of creative buyers..."

Cue designer outrage and then a hastily worded reply trying to back peddle. As I write this, F+W medias website has gone down due to technical difficulties.