No one is forcing anyone into anything. Personally I have had a good experience with 99designs but find them to be a bit pricey currently.
Excuse me? Would you say that to any other kind of professional? Your electrician? Your plumber? An engineer? “I don’t care how many hours you put in so long as you fix my toilet.” “I don’t care how many hours you put in so long as my power comes back on.” “I don’t care how many hours you put in so long as this thing gets built to spec.” And you’d expect them all to work for a flat rate? They’d tell you to go pound sand. Same with your accountant. Art is not easy. Art is work no matter your medium or skill level. It takes time to master and it takes even more time to practice it and pull off a project. Have some respect for the labor that goes into the craft.
What you describe is akin to technical drawing as opposed to creative drawing. The former is reproducing an image or drawing one to exact specifications, like a blueprint or drafting. The latter utilizes imagination, creativity and abstract thought. They are two very different kinds of skill sets. Both are important but they’re quite different. So far SAFE has more or less been asking for a creative illistration of a concept, a commission so to speak. They want a logo designed . If they already had a logo to be drawn there would be no need for the contest.
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Well, the contest has produced a mediocre crop, so almost anything would be better. It isn’t the money: I can hardly believe that SAFEnet is to be saddled with this crap.
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Of course it isn’t the money. Money has the reverse effect on creativity. Best to pay your artists enough so they can stop worrying about money and focus on the job at hand, But other than that giving them bonuses actually has the reverse effect. Didn’t you watch Dan Pink’s lecture on motivation?
This is why I’ve said from the beginning people should just be allowed to create their own symbols and images and then people can just opt whatever they like. What’s “official” is whatever is the most popular. It’s basic ritual and symbol adoption just like religion. You can have any number of different sects and religions but the major rituals, sects, religions win out not because someone declares them (unless you live in some god awful theocracy) but because people opt for them and that of course if subject to change over time. Just like recently how people are opting out of Abrahamic religions and going more pagan and what not these days. My point is that in selecting an “official” or even “high quality” SAFE logo we should simply let people submit designs and then set up a simple rating system. 1-5 or 1-10 whatever. In addition let people tip the artists. If artists are creating art FOR a prize or even a shot at a prize and more to the point are creating a logo according to specific guidelines according to what they think is wanted, as opposed to what SAFE means to them, then they’re less likely to come up with something original and more likely to conform to some kind of standard. Less likely to learn from and inspire one another and more likely to just end up all the same. I don’t think safe should have to be nessesarily “modern” or “youthful” or anything like that. It’s the internet. It can mean any number of things and will be used by any number of people and demographics. But the main issue is the whole tiered competition for a single prize. Why not hold weekly competititions for smaller prizes and then do a large monthly or bianual one? Like aware smaller $20 weekly safenet art/logo prizes then have a monthly $100 prize and then have a big 6 month prize for $500 or something. But yeah we’ve been over this before. “we need one logo forever” ad nausium. Since when did the internet need a logo? Since when did he internet have a specific symbol? there are nearly a dozen “internet” symbols running around. A globe with little orbits around them or a telephone pole next to a globe, or any number of such symbols. But the point is there’s lots of hem and they all work and they all compete. It’s cool and all to have a safenet logo competition but in the grand scheme of things it’s kind of silly to try and brand SAFE with a single symbol, even more so to complain about quality of said symbol.
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That’s an excellent idea. In fact, there’s nothing stopping them.
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You know it occurs to me that one could set it up so that one could have a custom logo slot in the software where one could insert one’s own custom SAFE logo. Somewhat like the same idea of CSS. The customization could be loaded and edited at the launcher and propogated across various apps. All the apps would have to do is include the appropriate line of CSS (or whatever code you want to use) to reference the file via the launcher. Then you could have a feature to upload custom images to a database somewhere and use reputation systems to determine popularity. Think something like Linux themes or plugins, or firefoxes personas or themes. You can customize almost any aspect of Linux. Why not do the same with SAFE?