The WordPress Icon Contest Quanundrum

Culture

A while back on the official WordPress blog the team called out to the design community in order to find some qualified icon designers for the upcoming 2.7 release’s admin interface. In this first post everything appeared normal with no indication that designers would go unpaid for their work. However it was a recent post asking the community to vote on the icons from a group of selected designers that had me perplexed.

A Change in Plans

It appears that in the process of finding designers, the WordPress team actually received 12 qualified candidates. Instead of choosing to base the work on the applicant’s letters of intent and portfolio, the team chose to propose a contest to the designers. Many of you know my stance on contests; I frankly find them a waste of time and demeaning to designers. I have been thinking about this for a while now, and the idea of a contest just doesn’t sit well with me.

This Sure Seems Unfair to the Designers

Aside from the fact that a competition is being held, the icons are then being voted on by the community and the concepts will be mixed and matched to come up with a final solution. Believe it or not, the community voting is not what bothers me here. I can accept that a piece of software being used by so many users probably should have some input from them. It is the implied notion of mixing the concepts submitted by the other unselected designers that really infuriates me. The winners should be selected for the entirety of their work, with conceptual rights remaining to the unselected designer.

Is the Winning Designer Even Getting Paid?

I cannot find any indication that the winning designer gets paid. However when a software product used by thousands of designers is open source is it unfair for them to ask for design services for free as well? Should the WordPress team expect to receive some goodwill in return for theirs? If the designers were aware upfront that they were not to be paid, then I think this scenario is actually acceptable. However half did decide not to participate when told about the contest, which implies to me that payment was expected. In the original blog post it seems very likely that one would expect payment, as there is no mention to suggest otherwise.

What is Your Opinion?

I know that my post is a bit of a rant, but I am just very unsure about the ethics of this contest. On one hand I love WordPress, and use it every day. On the other hand, I believe strongly in the NO-SPEC initiative, and the protection of designers’ rights.

If you have an opinion about the contest, I would really love to hear it so we can start a constructive channel of communication on the subject. I look forward to all of your comments.

11/14
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5 Responses to “The WordPress Icon Contest Quanundrum”

  1. Jane Wells
    November 15th, 2008 at 6:48 am

    Hi there. The original call for designers was very clear in asking for volunteers, not design gig applicants. The point was that instead of hiring a designer, we wanted to give WordPress-using designers a chance to participate in the open source project, as many had asked me for such an opportunity before.

    If you’re unfamiliar with the way the open source project is structured, code is produced by dozens of volunteer programmers, collated and edited by the lead developers and released under the GPL. The icon design project was intended to open source part of our design process as well, which the designers were fully aware of before they began designing. The designers who participated wanted to contribute to the open source project; this wasn’t a design job in the traditional sense, but a chance to become part of a design community within the larger WordPress contributors community. These designers may choose to continue contributing as design needs arise, or this may be their only contribution (just as volunteer developers may contribute chunks of code for each release or only one patch). They didn’t do it for money; they did it to give something back to the free open source application that they love, and they were all very excited about having a chance to contribute to it. In addition, features are largely decided by community vote on the WordPress.org web site, and when multiple developers submit a code patch, the development community decides which approach is the one that will be used, so a contest format is very in keeping with the way WordPress is developed.

    The fact that half dropped out wasn’t because of not being paid, since they knew that up front, but because there was no guarantee their work would be used once we decided to go with a contest format (as opposed to picking one volunteer designer and using their work straight out). Frankly, with an application as popular as WordPress, which is used by millions of people of every day, there’s a lot of cachet associated with being “the person who designed the custom icons,” and a lot of people liked the idea of that. When we decided to do a contest, about half decided it wasn’t worth the work if there was a possibility they wouldn’t win (and since all contestants’ portfolios were reviewed to ensure an even competition, this was a very good possibility). This actually was a positive development, in my opinion, because it really did winnow the field to people who wanted to be part of the community rather than just people who wanted the free publicity. The designers who remained in the contest were excited about the change and the chance to compete and possibly work with other designers moving forward.

    Hope this clarifies things a bit.

  2. Zinni
    November 15th, 2008 at 7:14 am

    Jane,

    Thank you for clarifying, you kind of ruined my idea of discussing it, but I am glad that these individuals were not being taken advantage of. In my opinion the way your team is handling the contest is acceptable then, and I am happy to receive the clarification. I am sure other designers out there were curious about this as well, and will be glad to see such a quick response from your team.

  3. Jane Wells
    November 15th, 2008 at 10:37 am

    Zinni, I’m glad to provide the clarification, but that doesn’t mean you can’t discuss the idea of contests in general. I think we are a strange case because of the open source community that powers WordPress, but the conversation you started is an important one, I think.

    Also, I noticed that it looks like someone has scraped your post here: http://gearhed.com/?p=186

  4. Dave
    November 17th, 2008 at 12:16 am

    That’s tough - where open-source meets earning a living. I support open source work, and I have allowed some of my designs to be used for free, but overall I think contests and freebies are a bad idea.

    I think of it this way: the value of the work is primarily its market value. In this case, that value is zero. It’s hard to separate this from a complete de-valuation of design work. Sure there’s an ego boost, but you can’t pay the rent with good feelings.

  5. Zinni
    November 17th, 2008 at 12:03 pm

    Dave,

    I agree with your statement, and that is why I personally could never compete in one of these contests. The recognition is worthwhile, but when running a business you need both recognition and revenue.

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