Aquent Vs the Design Industry

There’s been quite an in-depth thread on everybody’s favourite design news forum QBN.com (the new version of NewsToday.com) about the international recruitment company, Aquent’s advertisement on a popular Elance style design brokerage 99Design for a new website design with a ‘prize’ of $500 for the ‘winner’. What’s more important is that Aquent has chosen to contribute to the thread and even have a Blog post about it on one of their sites.

Now I’m all in favour of No-Spec! and believe that designers deserve to be paid a fair whack for the works they produce, something that in my opinion these brokerages fail with as the designs produced to fill the ‘brief’ are far from sufficient as the briefs tend to lack 99% of the information a designer needs to make an informed choice in the production of effective work.

A day or so ago they acknowledged that this was a BAAAAAAD idea … however the process in reaching the decision and communication involved make really interesting reading for anyone considering such using a brokerage service.

• Original 99Designs post
• The Qbn discussion
• Aquents blog entry
• Aquents Facebook comments on it
• The Denverologist (New)
• No-Spec!
• Graphic Push Thread (New)
• Positive Space Thread (New)
• Aquents Facebook (New)