New casting by illy for graphic designers

Hi there, great news from illy! :smiley:

illy City Mug is the new casting by illy on Desall, looking for graphical proposals for an exclusive line of mugs by illy dedicated to six world-famous cities: Rome, Milan, Paris, London, San Francisco and Hong Kong.

Read all the info on: http://des.al/illymug

Deadline: April 9th, 2014

Awards: 6 x Collaboration contracts with illy for the development of the graphics for the Mugs

It looks like a nice little assignment and of course it would be nice for any designer to see their work printed on an Illy cup, but I’m probably not going to enter because of the little chance to win something. If the designs are already created, what does the work contract entail? Some extra hours of paid work to refine the design? So then basically the entire creative process will be unpaid work for the winners but also the rest. Also for each mug there is only one winner - and probably this same designer will win more prizes because Illy likes to keep the designs consistent with each other - so the chance of getting any compensation is very low. If say, for each mug design there were 3-5 awards, the lowest maybe being as low as $50 or even something like a selection of Illy coffees, I would probably enter a submission.

I and several other designers I know wish companies invested more seriously and in a more balanced/fair way in these crowdsourced assignments. The more they invest, the more quality submissions they will get as well. It seems to me that as a company you would in many cases be willing to invest almost as much as you would have to pay to hire a professional design agency, since now you will get many more ideas with a good number of them developed on a professional level. There is a much higher chance that that ‘perfect design’ is formed in the mind of a designer vs. having only one or a few people at an agency creating ideas. But for this challenge the entire conceptual process is unpaid, something you could pay probably around $1-2k for with a professional agency.

It’s not a complaint, just an explanation of why I and probably many other designers do not partake in such challenges.

Hi there, thanks for your feedback. :slight_smile: Actually the cash awards given by the sponsoring company, illy, were in line with the market prices for the requested project. Desall was not involved in this process, rather the company came in direct contact with the winning designer once the contest was over. Other companies may have different policies as with many of the other contests held on our platform. We remain at your disposal. Cheers

Stay tuned!