Of all the invisible wars simmering within our collective unconscious, the battle waging closest to the designer's homefront is over crowdsourced design. CrowdSpring? 99designs? 

Granted, if your design practice is communications oriented, this is a hotspot you've scratched before;  if you're an architect, you may find this model analagous to industry-specific practices you take for granted; if you're a designer just out of school, you may see this as stepping stone to rewarding work and employment; and so on and so forth down the line. Despite strong positions for and against crowdsourcing, it's always tempering to remember that different lines can be drawn over what constitutes unacceptable practice.

CrowdSpring and 99designs is a forum for "specwork," defined by advocacy group NO!SPEC as any kind of creative work rendered and submitted, either partial or completed, by a designer to a prospective client/employer before taking steps to secure both their work and an equitable fee. These two crowdsourced design sites ask their customers to post creative briefs that morph into bona fide competitions, drawing dozens or even hundreds of design responses by closing date . The winner receives a nominal fee (as little as $200), and the client receives a logo or website - at fire sale prices. All the rest can, well, go home and be good sports about the whole thing. 

NO!SPEC calls foul on these sites and similar offline schemes. "The designer in essence works free of charge and with an often falsely advertised, overinflated promise for future employment; or is given other insufficient forms of compensation." There's a thin line between creative challenge and exploitation when younger designers are cajoled into believing that their efforts, regardless of the result, can always be meaningful for their portfolios (the "you're-doing-it-for-yourself" argument"). The AIGA  also sounds a caution over aspects of intellectual property, trademark and trade-dress infringements in undertaking specwork. 

What happens to value in the age of free work? is what I want to know. Isn't this what the guilds of pre-enlightenment Europe were for (sees also: trade unions, cartels, socialism)? If crowdsourcing design represents the worst of what internet communities can do for the new reality of work, then let this end on an uplifting note: Brandstack shakes off some of evil vibes. Brandstack asks designers to submit unused logo designs “so they can make money off good designs that are going to waste anyway… Designers usually work to produce higher volume than they actually get paid for, so they have plenty of these designs just taking up space on their hard drives.”