It also pointedly exposes why so many designs really dissolve once they’re examined or utilized for any period of time – if they were a visual band-aid to begin with, they merely covered the real problem and will ultimately lose their adhesion. It produces the glut of shiny new logos that everyone simply ignores and printed materials that everyone simply discards. Real design therapy allows the client and designer to both examine the issues at hand clearly and concisely and then develop the elements that facilitate actual needs and demands.

This might also be a great point in time to set up a bit more of a truce with RP and offer the sort of services you described to them – it’d be a good mobilization of the BE A community in the service of needs they might not have recognized (I’m very curious if they’re drifting in our direction in the same way we are in theirs). It’d also correlate well with some of the earlier on-line design research you were conducting…

On the other ball being tossed in this: Bennett, thanks for sharing your competition / contest experience as well. I didn’t necessarily suspect that you were a contest-victim, so to speak, but did wonder at the underlying motivations in this string…

If we’d like to jump train-tracks with the trade pub string, it’d probably be at least helpful in an organizational sense to move onto it, but it’s also fun to watch the organic way these conversations migrate into other territories.

My interest in that topic comes out of a bit of a personal attitude shift towards them – during my initial post-undergraduate employment my employer had a pretty lackluster attitude about the Print and HOW annuals / competitions especially and never entered any of the work we were doing (despite the fact that I felt it stood a really strong chance of inclusion in most instances). Part of it generally boiled down to the idea of paying them to include the work to begin with (or to not include it if that was the way the cards fell), and the other portion of it seemed to come from the sense that having work included in them rarely translated into any sort of measured increase in work for the business.

Post-grad studies and now looking at a career that will be primarily academic past this point, the annuals are an extremely viable career-aid. Most colleges and universities at the very least encourage or more often require their faculty to “publish” on a regular basis to maintain the accreditation of their staff and of the schools. That said, being a design / illustration professor means putting out client work that is “published” in the sense of it going into reproduction of one form or another, but also means getting some work fairly regularly into the annuals.

Although it’s a semi-requirement, I also find it motivated me to look at the annuals from the perspective of both potential employers and potential students – I thought it was extremely exciting and fun to see the work of my professors pop up in them, and I know it was reassuring to the university itself to find it there as well. They were strongly promoted as an area of dialogue between the profession and its observers as well, so I’ve very much begun treating them with far more sincerity and scrutiny than I did when I was simply a “working stiff”, so to speak.

I’m still of the opinion that entering them with the perspective of it gaining anyone “more work” is fairly misguided, but they are an excellent place to have your work “noticed” in one regard or another. As an educator, I also view them as a fairly excellent resource for general documentation – I’ve dug through old annuals on several occasions to cull out example work to show to my students and to spark discussion / dialogue. It’s fun to bring out work that might not have been looked at for some time and show it alongside the freshest produce – it also illustrates design trends in an incredibly immediate way.

The fact that individuals have to submit some payment along with their work also correlates to an aspect of the RP / similar competitions that we might not have addressed yet: the curious and intriguing relationship that people have with things that are offered free of charge.

I’m working with a particular effort at the moment that runs several annual technical workshops training the individuals that are essentially their clientele in using the equipment they provide. They routinely charge a fee for these workshops – cost added on top of what organizations / individuals have paid for the equipment already (although I’m certain in several instances that equipment owners pay a discounted rate for workshops).

I and an associate both asked them why they charged – was it really a revenue necessity, or was it a requirement for them to even be able to run the workshops?

Their answer was, “Not really – in most instances we don’t even technically make anything off the workshops themselves. We just found out pretty quickly that people didn’t treat the workshops as valuable unless we attached some opening dollar value to them. It ensured that people made a point of showing up for the workshops and really made sure they got everything out of them they could.”

That, in a nutshell, is one of the things that can be so egregious about certain competitions: either that they treat the materials gained with about as much value as many other “free” things, or that they’ve known all along the true value of what they’re collecting and simply cheated their way around making that payment.

The annuals / competitions of that nature still put a pretty decent value on the things that they collect and seek to demonstrate some quality / value threshold in those things they put on display, even if they often feel like they offer a very particular / singular vision of what quality & value entail.

Paul, I haven’t especially been burned by similar competitions that I have competed in. Yes, that’s right, I have competed in contests like that on RP. Of course I wasn’t happy if I didn’t win, but that is to be expected. I haven’t competed in one since college, and I think they were all part of a specific design class. My view points and knowledge of our profession have greatly changed and expanded since college as well. I had contemplated competing in our states license plate competition a couple of years ago, but I decided against it for the same reasons I didn’t compete in the RP contest.

As far as the major trade pub competitions, I don’t have a big problem with them. It seems that people are very biased one way or the other on this issue, including me. The people I talk to, who don’t like these contest seem to work as Professors or they work at an agency that doesn’t enter their work in the first place. There are also good arguments against the slap-dash way that many of these are judged. There is always the old question. “How can you judge design when you only have 15 seconds to look at it?” Maybe Drew, our resident CA judge, can give us his insight into these competitions and judging.

Would you draw a line between the trade pub competitions and the trade organization contests (i.e. AIGA & ADC)? Just curious. You didn’t mention them in your question. There are so many different issues when it comes to these contest, I don’t know where to begin. Are there to many? How should they be judged? Why do we need them? How would we see new work if we didn’t have them? Are local contests beneficial? The list goes on.

If we really want to discuss our industry competitions I am open to that. We could also start another thread just for this purpose, or maybe it is more interesting in the midst of logo and poster contest discussion. Either way.

Some comments have touched on it, but I want to highlight the area of WHAT we give to clients for a second. I don’t believe that what we give to clients is always something we produce. In this case the best design help for the low-budget RP identity would be to hire a designer to design the CONTEST. Probably in a one-hour consultation, any of us could have helped the station owners design the process of the contest for the best hopes of success given the circumstances. Still not a great solution, but one that fit their desires… no matter how misguided they are.

It bothers me that their goal was to get a new logo. Is that it? Does that need justify design? Shouldn’t their goals have been something more like “a 10% increase in revenue in 6months” or “a 5% increase in listeners in a year”? What we give to them that is valuable, is not a new logo, but the ability to solve communication problems that reach their business goals.

Maybe too many of us have only been selling logos and brochures instead of selling communication. It’s sort of like selling someone a new $5,000 ergonomic chair when a better solution would be to change how they work, so that they don’t sit slumped over a computer for 10 hours a day, while getting no excercise.

Until RP is willing to admit their need for help in addressing real issues, I don’t think we can offer them anything. If they just want a “cool” new logo, we do ourselves a disservice by saying “we’re the ones for that.” Hopefully just pooping out logos (whether they are on a $3 million budget or for free) is not what we are about.

All in all, I think that particular competition was fairly poorly managed and I had similarly disappointed reactions to the work that I saw posted as the “picks” of the litter – stuff I found extremely mediocre for the performer in question, but stuff that the performer reacted fairly glowingly to…

I wondered in that example, though, how much the things that the performer had seen that I found kind of amateur and not that interesting really had an authenticly DIY appeal to them to the performer. I know there had to be a bunch of other practicing designers that must have thrown their contribution in at one point or another, and I kind of suspect that they felt too polished in one way or another for the artist.

The results of that competition were ultimately pretty insignificant, though – despite discussion about a logo / personal mark coming out of the competition that would go into use for the performer, I never saw anything reach the light of day from the selection bin. It occured in the midst of a website overhaul anyway, so I suspect it was something that simply got canned in the midst of other developments and recording responsibilities.

To speak perfectly candidly, I definitely felt like I had contributed some solid work to the competition and really hoped my work would show up somewhere in the picks – not a hope that panned out by any means…Some of my reaction to the other things shown I know was discolored by the knowledge mine had been ashcanned for one reason or another, but then I also quickly felt like I hadn’t any sense of what the final selection criteria was based on what had been chosen.

All that said, it didn’t really burn my biscuits on competitions to such a large degree that I’ve never considered entering them again. I went into that particular competition thinking “Wow, what a great opportunity to try and get some good work in front of that performer – I like their work a great deal and it’d be more than great if they happened to like mine” – visions of fame and some small fortune definitely did a jig or two in my brain, even though reality quickly eclipsed that particular dance party.

“Although the financial impact of the RP contest may not be felt, the overall impression it gives to its dedicated listeners is far worse. So many listeners respect RP’s Bill and Rebecca decisions and view of creativity. This gives the impression that one of your most valuable commodities, your identity, can be gained through a little contest without much thought.” – I think we really need to cut Bill and Rebecca a lot more slack on this issue. I don’t believe based on anything that’s been stated on their site that they’re utilizing this competition / call for work as a measuring stick for creativity, but I clearly see them attempting to champion the same sort of thinking and grass-roots efforts that they have taken to make RP what it is in their identity contest.

On the topic of logo-creation / identity design, though, it’s a business that’s equal parts sincere, thoughtful idea / image expression and the selling of lucky rabbit’s feet – there are some outstanding examples of exceptionally designed marks that have really stood the test of time and gained some major equity along the road, and there are some amazing stinkbombs that have stuck around about as long. Despite the profound presence that logos have in our daily lives, they’re still largely viewed as a triviality to most people (most of whom are directly bonded to at least three major logos that they knowledgeably display or wear unawares…). Logo contests are going to fall on par with drawing contests and coloring contests to most, Bennett – fun diversions from the things that most people spend the majority of their time doing.

Logos only acrue the value that’s attributed to them and invested in them – the more esteem they’re held in, and the more people holding that esteem, the richer an entity they become. The less esteem and value, the more trivial and innocuous they tend to remain…The description of them as a future only holds water to someone who is even initially willing to invest in the notion of them as being a future, and this really depends on how visually responsive someone is (or how willing they are to understand that major elements of their audience might be).

All of this wraps back around to elements of so many previous discussions in terms of that killer moment when you try to explain what you do to most people – it’s generally easier to demonstrate it when you exercise your skills towards a concern / need that they have, but there are still large portions of it that are “invisible”/cognitive processes that can’t be totally observed or measured. The thought that someone gets paid to work on these little .5″ – 1″ symbols that show up on products floats somewhere in the same genre as the notion that small elves labor for hours daily in a tree trunk producing chocolate-backed cookies – strange fiction that few people ever observe in process or in the flesh…

I guess I’d also like to throw the personal question back in your direction, Bennett – do you feel like you’ve been significantly burned by past competitions like this, or if not, what especially motivated you to call this one to attention?

To raise another potential hot-button within this, how do you feel about many of the major trade publication “contests / competitions”, i.e. Print, HOW, CA Design Annuals and similar ilk? I’ve had some fairly heated discussions on the subject of the pay-per-entry ticket prices for these and their ultimate significance / insignificance…

Just a few thoughts about what you have said. I didn’t address all of your points. Maybe at a later date.

Newwavegurly wasn’t really pointing any perfect finger back at anyone. The AIGA poster contest has been part of this thread the entire time. It wasn’t some new realization. Don’t call it a come back . . . Of course the AIGA and GAG aren’t perfect just because of the kind of organization they are. The nature of these two competitions are vastly different. The AIGA competition has no clients or revisions, and there is no specification as to what you have to design. Paul, you are correct. It is perfect excuse to do what designers aren’t able to do for clients. Bottom line, this contest promotes creativity and design. The AIGA isn’t trying to get and identity or brochure out of free speculative work. The main goal of the AIGA competition is to promote design by giving designers a chance to flex their creative muscle, and to get the public out to see these posters in a show.

The RP contest is soliciting (practically) free design with no real benefits to the designer. Unless you believe their promise of world wide acclaim. The AIGA WDD Poster Contest is a unique freedom from constraints, there will be multiple winners, whereas the RP logo contest is everything but ideal.

Although the financial impact of the RP contest may not be felt, the overall impression it gives to its dedicated listeners is far worse. So many listeners respect RP’s Bill and Rebecca decisions and view of creativity. This gives the impression that one of your most valuable commodities, your identity, can be gained through a little contest without much thought. The exponential effect of this could be great. I just hope that small business owners don’t come away from RP thinking that since they don’t make much money and they have a dedicated following, that they can have a contest for any design that they need.

Obviously designers as a whole have a long way to go to convince the public that design is a valuable commodity. I don’t know how many times I read something like this on the RP threads “Chill out, it is just a logo” Just a logo. Just you image. Just something you will use for the next ten years. Just your future. Just . . . Maybe in the end RP will get a great logo and in turn get enough new listeners and support to pay for design in the future. Maybe all the controversy over at RP will make RP rethink the way they solicit design in the future.

(Plus, don’t we all more or less consider these sorts of things “portfolio helper”? – those one-shot gigs that allow us the creative excuse to do something we’ve wanted to do for a while but might not have been able to get the right client for?)