It’s also ironic, perhaps, that the exclusive nature of a logo is actually necessary for the act of subverting it, too. You can’t use the Nike logo or the Shell logo against the company in protest if it isn’t a mark that’s exclusive to them in the first place.
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Very well put.
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I think you leave out the desirable and inevitable function of logos – to become the basis of the new religion. In the future we will all be slaves of a new Theocracy based on a Cult of Commercial Style over Substance. We will be happier, you know this to be true.
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Personally I hope it’s this one.

An excerpt from my blog post:
“With my Government 2.0 Taskforce hat on, my response is please participate, not so that we get something for free, but so that you can contribute to an important process of democracy. If everyone who will contribute to the taskforce over the next 6 months demands fees for their services there would be no task force members, no new ideas, no participation and no change.”

http://www.lisaharvey.com.au

Is the position now that only an idiot would enter without receiving at least a little cold hard cash? That’s the clear implication of your comment, Fine.

We really don’t need to label all entrants as ’suckers’, you know. Better simply to recognise the obvious fact that for many graphic designers it will be in their interests (and in the public interest, by the way) to enter this ‘competition’, even though a by-product of their entry is probably to exert downward pressure on the profits of other (likely more well-established) graphic designers.

BBB

Clearly if someone is willing to do the work that is required to enter this ‘competition’, then they value the benefits (e.g. experience, exposure) at greater than the costs (e.g. in time, opportunity cost), and therefore the ‘favours’ cut both ways. What you are really saying is that you personally would never do the cost/benefit analysis and come out on the side of contributing for $0, and therefore if someone else does it is reflective of some undesirable attitude (on the part of both acquirer and supplier).

A lot of the comments here are really about private interests vs. the public interest. Clearly it is in the public interest to spend as little as possible on graphic design (so long as the results are still fit for purpose). However, a ‘competition’ of the kind being discussed here threatens the profits of private graphic designers (sorry, “workers”). If the net result is that the public can rely on amateurs or newly-minted professionals (using that term loosely) to produce acceptable graphic design forever more, then all the better for the public.

Finally, isn’t the inconvenient truth here that while truly great graphic design requires highly skilled individuals, graphic design that is merely ‘good enough’ (certainly for Gruen’s purposes) is actually very easy to come by, and thus its price is very low indeed.

BBB

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tux

Logos are inherently connected to trademark. Free floating signifiers can’t really be logos. If you could put a swoosh on everything it wouldn’t make sense to use it as a logo. The process is cultural as well as legal I guess.

True, which is why I’m arguing that you can’t see a logo design contest in the same way as an open source initiative, because the contest-holders are asking for something that can’t be public property if it’s to do the job it’s needed for.

It’s also ironic, perhaps, that the exclusive nature of a logo is actually necessary for the act of subverting it, too. You can’t use the Nike logo or the Shell logo against the company in protest if it isn’t a mark that’s exclusive to them in the first place.

If the Nike logo were open source it wouldn’t be the Nike logo. Logos are trademarks generally. If the logo is a trademark then it’s associated with a particular brand.

Thanks for that; here I was writing about graphic design like I don’t know what a logo is. /snark

So thousands of these so-called ‘competitions’ are being held annually, and people are now legitimately able to put “winner” of the ‘2009 Blah Blah’ competition on their CV’s… even though, the judges are merely clients and not highly regarded industry professionals? This devalues and degrades properly constituted & judged Design Competitions and Design Awards and secondly overstates the competency of the so-called ‘designer competition winners’ to other potential employers and clients.

Yay for Standards!

And again, if people can’t see the difference between what goes on in the overall market in terms of providing services for free or bartering or Gift in kind etc – ie. between consenting adults, and what a Govt Dept does, especially when Government Departments form a huge backbone for the graphic design & printing and web graphic industry, then you ain’t going to get it now.

The Taskforce organisers even stated that they could have given it to our in-house departmental designers . So the work is not even being out-sourced but crowd-sourced and I said, a competition fig-leaf applied.

Graphic designers (including up and coming designers and graduates), have a huge and legitimate stake in making sure these practices do not become entrenched in Government nor in any listed companies and across major brands etc etc. As to what happens outside, it’s always been a graphics- free- for-all, always, as it should be.

Under the old ‘bull” labour system on the wharves, someone at least got paid for a day’s work.

Then you’re likely to have start forking out money and employ someone to increase the probability that it gets done.

I guess we’ll just have to wait to find out if enough people are interested or not and whether they’ve allowed enough time for it to be done. But I still don’t see the competition as an insult to designers or not valuing their work.

Ask a random open source programmer to work on a random project for free and you’ll probably get a no in response. Ask them to develop something they’re really interested in and they have the time or ask around and find a group of people who are already working on an open source project doing something similar then you’re much more likely to get a positive response to your request. Want it done on your schedule or in a specific way? Then you’re likely to have start forking out money and employ someone.

There’s one programmer in Australia that had free pizzas for many years as people would who use something he wrote and distributed freely would ring up his local pizza store and add credit to his account

But would he have been happy to keep that arrangement if the Govt had called and asked him to program something for them, for a pizza or two?

Sorry I misunderstood. That being said, many companies and individuals do contribute cash (or in-kind products/services) to open source projects without strings being attached. There’s one programmer in Australia that had free pizzas for many years as people would who use something he wrote and distributed freely would ring up his local pizza store and add credit to his account

Re: Wordpress – its likely that the proprietary software equivalents would be even
more expensive if wordpress and similar open source products didn’t exist.