Exploit Me! : A Designer's Guide to Surviving Design Competitions

February 25, 2008 | Articles
Posted by: Carl Alviani [Permalink]

photo: John Haslam

If contests are so bad for the profession, why do we keep entering them?

An article by Jeff Fisher in Fast Company this month discusses, as others have before, how bad a deal design contests can be for those who enter them. They require enormous effort, the chances of winning are slight, and even the grand prize doesn't usually compensate for the time invested. Worse than all of this, participants stand to lose rights to their own work; Fisher's example of a book cover competition for graphic designers includes this snippet of text from the entry rules:

All entries become the property of Sponsors. By entering the Contest, the winner agrees to assign all of his or her rights, title and interest in the entry (including all copyrights, trademarks, design rights, moral rights and all other intellectual property rights) to the Sponsors or their designee(s).

What all these articles are pointing out is that there's great potential for exploitation here, and I'm inclined to agree with them. Yet most of us know about it, and we continue to enter, despite the downsides. Shortly out of school, I designed a piece of flat pack furniture for Designboom.com, and got a Shortlisted Entry out of it. No money, not a lot of notoriety, but I didn't feel cheated, and I'd do it again--in fact I'm working on an entry for Dell's Re-Generation competition at this moment.

James Owen entered the Designboom competition too, and he won. You could find this out by scrolling up from my entry to his Grand Prize winning one at the top of the page; it's a clever stool called the Rumble Seat, which incorporates an audio jack and a large subwoofer into its body. You could also find this out by going to his website, where it sits among several other contest winners, some from previously completed projects, others custom-designed.

At first blush James might seem a great argument for why not to get into a competition: even having won several of them and their accompanying cash prizes, it's clear after some discussion that the monetary rewards aren't nearly worth the time and effort invested. For other designers--less experienced, less lucky, or simply not as talented--the return is even lower. If James represents the best case scenario and still makes his money elsewhere, how could the rest of us justify wasting our time this way?

The short answer is: if you're in it for the money, you're doing it for the wrong reason. While there are some pretty good prizes out there (Dell is offering $25,000 to the overall Re-Generation winner), the real benefits of a good contest are available to all entrants. The trick is not to view it as an employment opportunity, because it's not; it's a professional development and marketing tool.

If designing for a competition were the same as designing for a client, the payoff would be poor indeed. But in many ways a well-designed competition is like The Best Client Ever. Think about the characteristics of a Bad Client:

::Non-specific and constantly shifting deadlines.
::Frequent changes in project scope.
::"I know it when I see it" design requirements.
::Wants you to do something just like you did for another client four months ago.

A Bad Client offers too little information when you most need it--at the beginning--and starts making changes when you can least afford it--at the end.

A good design competition is the opposite of all these things. It starts with a clear, concise statement of constraints, target market, manufacturability requirements, and expected deliverables, all before you even agree to start working. It tells you exactly when results are due. It will never ever call you three months into the project to say the production budget's been cut by 30%. It has no idea what you've designed in the past nor does it care, so you're free to knock yourself off, or knock yourself out with a totally new direction. And if you blow it, nobody gets mad at you, and your professional reputation remains intact.

Better clients make for better design, and if you can spare the time, you may find this virtual Dream Client allows you to grow professionally in ways your paying projects don't. Owen points out several portfolio pieces that were originally competition entries, and they add diversity and richness to the more staid client-driven work. They attract better clients too, by showcasing the kind of work he wants to do, in addition to the sort he's had to do.

They're also an outstanding marketing opportunity. One of James' more successful competition pieces doesn't show up on his trophy page at all, because it didn't win. The product--a sculptural, rocking scratching-post for cats--didn't even place, in fact, when he designed it for a competition hosted by Design Within Reach in 2006. But despite having sunk $4000 into the prototype, it's turned out to be a shrewd career move. "I sent out a bunch of press releases on it anyway," he explains, "and it ended up getting featured in several different magazines. I'm still getting requests today--two years later!--asking where to buy one, and three different retailers have offered up orders for 20, 50, 100 pieces." The post, called Leo, is currently being reviewed for manufacturing, but even if he never makes a dime off of it, he reckons it was a great investment in publicity and contacts.

Owen isn't working on any competitions at the moment. His work schedule is too full, and that's kind of the point. Freelancers and small design shops are in a curious marketing position: too small to buy much traditional advertising, but too dependent upon brand awareness to depend on networking alone. Competitions are one part of a powerful alternative marketing strategy, if properly exploited.

"If you play it right, they're a great way to get clients," he notes, explaining the greater marketing environment in which his competive work operates. Competitions provide new portfolio material, which then go on his own website, whatever publicity outlets the competition host provides, and a carefully constructed press release. The press releases go to design websites and publications ("they are absolutely starving for good content," explains Owen, "you just have to get it out to them..."), and at this point the project becomes part of the vast cloud of information pointing clients and contacts toward him.

So in addition to playing the results right, the other key to getting the most out of a competition is to pick the right one. The past five or six years have seen an explosion in the number of solicitations, and not all of them are legitimate. Some, like Designboom's, are clearly designed to be equitable and useful. Designers retain rights to their work unless specifically approached about production; a large number of entries are published on the website and stay there (my entry from 2005 still shows up on the second or third page of results when my name is Googled); the awards show is made into a large enough event that it attracts media attention to everyone involved; and topics are interesting and flexible. Dell addresses the issue of Intellectual Capital directly in the Frequently Asked Questions section of Re-Generation's Competition pages (Q: Will I own my design? If so, can I produce it or sell the design? A: You will own your own design only if you have taken the proper steps to protect it according to the laws of your country. This is an important question, be sure to thoroughly read the Official Rules on the Website before you submit your entry. The Competition Sponsor is making no claim to the ownership of your ideas.)

There are also dozens of exploitative competitions out there too--"sinister" is the word Owens uses--but these have as much in common with Designboom and Dell as a folding table on Canal Street covered in "Rolexx" watches has with Tiffany's. Bald-faced attempts to get free work are bad competitions by definition, and James won't touch them with a ten-foot pole; neither will I. That's the part of competition work that never gets described in the rules or FAQ's: you're not working for the competition, the competition's working for you. If you want to get the most out of it, choose carefully, and exploit the hell out of it.