Posted by damienmckenna on June 14, 2012 at 3:27pm
While discussing membership renew with the DA twitter account I had an idea: I'd love to have an annual renewal on my membership for the t-shirt offer that was added last year; however, rather than ending up with a dozen identical t-shirts, how about running an annual competition to have the forthcoming year's design?
The first question: was there plans to change the DA's official membership t-shirt each year?
The second question: time allowing, is this something the DA would be interested in?
Update: I just wanted to clarify that my idea was not aimed to "abuse the designers" spec work, I was thinking of something like the Woot t-shirt derby.
Comments
I'll spread the word about this
Thanks for posting about this Damien. I'd love to hear opinions about a competition and other designs. We've sold 481 membership t-shirts to date and still have some in stock.
In order to give a similar membership+shirt option to people who are renewing, we'd have to pull this off and launch by November because that is when many members will expire who had bought with a shirt in 2011.
Separate from a membership t-shirt, I got some good responses on @DrupalAssoc for items that would be cool to see in the ADO store and am in progress getting a list together and doing some research. Feedback is welcome on this too. We have 2 great shirts in there now, but they look a bit lonely.
https://association.drupal.org/store
T-shirt design contests will alienate the design community
While I understand that this suggestion is not intended to "abuse designers", the bottom line is that any design contest, regardless of its intention, is fundamentally asking for spec work and devalues the work of designers and illustrators.
The difference between this and Woot! or Threadless is that those contests are not asking designers and illustrators to create marketing material or solve a business problem, just to submit something they might think is cool. A Drupal Association t-shirt contest would be from an organization seeking designs that would be used as marketing collateral for that organization, and those people should receive compensation for their time.
We have spent a lot of time and energy bringing designers to Drupal and this is precisely the sort of thing that drives them away.
A better way to approach this would be to ask designers to submit examples of existing work in their portfolio, then hire the winner(s) to create a t-shirt design for the Association. This would not only help the Association get more items into their store, but it would also result in better work from the winning designer(s).
The DA routinely asks
The DA routinely asks developers and documentation writers to volunteer effort - why is it so out of line to ask designers to contribute too? I could make a similar argument that the whole notion of an "open source" project is to devalue the work of developers ...
Here's the difference
When developers, writers, and others are asked to volunteer to help write code or documentation, it's for material that will be used to benefit the Drupal project. While they're not receiving monetary compensation for their efforts, their time and energy is treated with respect, and they receive credit for their contribution.
When designers are asked to create designs for a contest, they're spending their time and energy on something that may or may not be used. Only the work of winners is deemed to have value, and all of the time and effort expended by losing entrants is wasted, which is disrespectful to those individuals.
One of the reasons we like to develop open source software in the open is that we want to avoid wasteful duplication of effort. When we ask designers to participate in a contest, we're asking people to intentionally duplicate effort, knowing that only the work of the winners will be valued/used.
If a designer chooses to donate their time to create a t-shirt design at the Association's request, that's fine with me, as long as that person's time is treated with respect and the product created from that effort is used. The issue is with asking people to spend time and energy creating work that may never see the light of day.
At the risk of taking this
At the risk of taking this further off-topic...
There are plenty of examples where developers, writers and "others" have contributed work only to see it languish. Here's patches that need review sorted by oldest issues. That's just one high-density grouping of content, but there are dozens of others.
I think there are some important differences in design and development, but a guarantee of use is not one of them.
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
I think we're talking about two different things
What we're talking about here is actively soliciting work that we know will not be used. Your example refers to work that people have voluntarily contributed back to to the community that has not been used by others.
An analogy would be if we asked five different people to write documentation for the same module, telling them that after they had done the work, someone would review it and then pick the "best" version for drupal.org, discarding the rest. I think we can all agree that that model would not be a terribly motivating one.
Some background
For those readers still questioning the antipathy towards design competitions, here's a nice collection of links: http://www.no-spec.com/articles/ (I'm glad this discussion moved on.)
PINGV | Strategy • Design • Drupal Development
Nuff said
Thanks George, that squashes it right there. Thanks.
My stand on design competitions & Drupal Merchandice
I was asked to give my point on this ... so here goes (Rant Alert)
George is spot on about this, but theres actually more to it than just that, its also about 2 very different way's of thinking 2 different cultures.
Development vs. Design
Drupal is deep down a development community & project - so if it want to attrack others it needs to get out of that "dev" thinking, without loosing its roots & that isnt uncomplicated.
a thing that the community seems to not understand about doing designs is that its usually a very very (very!) personally thing, where you take everything you got - heart, sould, passion, skills & abilities & put it all down the table - yes designers are very touchy feely (im one of them) & usually have ego's out of this world - else we would not survive the onslaug
The reason for that is simply that anyone can have an opinion about design ,where raw code is for those that understand "dude this sql works it took 0.00001 mili sec to get all this data" where the design is "i dont like the Blue it dosnt feel so nice with the white "
Then to have you work judged by ( now im probably gonna offend everyone) "judges" aka the community that goes with the "I dont know what i like, but i know what i DONT like"
yes im speaking in broad terms here & im probably judging someone - sorry about that. But i am talking from experience.
That process is frustrating beyond batteling an issueque - it rips the creative lust out of you very bone - look at it as an RFP, from a client you have no idea what they want - but will come after you with 1.000.000 users... ;)
How its done
Its importent to understand that doing code & designing is to extremely different things, if we (the DA) wanna have designs for the a yearly shirt - Well then the DA should find some $ (or kudo's points whatever)
Contact a designer or 2 ask em to do a kick ass shirt, if the DA isnt able cant find any proven designers with a proven track well then we have a bigger problem & an organisation that is not in contact with its own members & please no more RFP's, seriously is it amateur hour or wtf is going on? :(
Drupal powered by Pride, Dedication & kicking ass ;)
We need Quality Merchandice for Drupal, and not the kind of cheap BS we see in other software projects (non mention non forgotten) but its 90% fugly
We have to look at it as a part of the Branding of Drupal & not just as a cheap "funny" crap gimmicks
We are showing off Drupals quality everytime anyone takes on the jersey & walks out into the world
im not kidding about this - It refelcts directly on drupal as a product, a community & the level of professionalism, if the merchandice looks like shit we all look like shit!
Way back when Bluemarine ruled the Drupal world, the first respond i got, when i said "hi im a designer..." was that devs were tired of hearing from Designers telling em that "Drupal Looked like crap", well lets be honest here Bluemarine's design wasnt awesome, but it served its purpose.
It gave those of us who's from a world where "its pretty" rules over "it works & can do all thise amazing geek stuff" that drupal was crap, cause it didnt look sexy - its the same here with merch. If its not awesome then forget about it.
I have offered to put my back catalog on sale for the DA, unfortuanately that cant be dont because of some legal crap (the DA beeing a non profit yadi yadi... what do i know :/)
So now i will have to go another way around it, probably open my own webshop & figure out a way to send som gold back to the devel of Drupal - i still belive i can design a pretty epic Tshirt, that people will wear.
But im not putting my Heart, Soul, Dedication & creativity on display for a voting comite.
rant done.
/mortendk
/morten.dk king of rock
morten.dk | geek Royale
@mortendk I don't think you
@mortendk I don't think you are ranting. But at large I agree with this perspective. Although competitions can be great, they are not good for this purpose. I hope we can take an sensible approach, and hire a few designers to make great designs. For that to happen, you do need someone within the DA who understands branding and can align that with the designers we are working with. Otherwise mortendk's point, of most OS projects having fugly designs is likely to come true.
I do think the DA, should worry more about expanding the amount of shop items - the fact that morten.dk can't share his articles through the shop, sounds sad to me. Enabling people who are already doing it, should be part of the strategy.
my 2p
I totally agree a yearly design contest is not the way forward, however I don't agree that design and development are that far apart.
Coding is an art (see origins of the word "technology"), but rarely are people paid to write beautiful code, most projects people are paid to achieve X for company Y by date Z, and they don't really care whether the code is 0.00001 milliseconds faster or not.
I think we have a big opportunity to increase DA funding through selling merchandise, and I think we should think of different ways we can compensate - I don't think just paying designers to do a couple of designs will cut the mustard.
One of the major differences is that module development often comes as a result of paid work, so the module submitter has already been paid for the work done, as opposed to a designer who is being asked to design something upfront. Many module maintainers then spend lots of time providing support, whereas once a designers design is done it's done, so actually development uses more time, resources, energy, and love.
To think differently about this I've had one potential model idea - anyone can submit designs for the store and in return, if their designs make over a certain amount of profit then they get something in return, for example a ticket to DrupalCon.
This way we don't set boundaries on the amount of products in the store, the more popular products rise to the top, and it should work on a similar way to the contributed module scene does, but as there is direct cash being made from designs (the ones which sell) we can thus implement some kind of business model / return of payment for work done.
Steve, interesting reply: To
Steve, interesting reply:
Alternatively, how about anyone who submits a design that meets specific (to be determined) requirements gets a free Drupalcon ticket & t-shirt?
Nice idea but...
As nice sounding as that may be, it would end up being counter productive and excluding.
Idea of selling merchandise is to increase revenue for DA. Giving away a Drupalcon ticket for each would have opposite effect in my view.
again the issue of design being more subject to individual taste, so once more you end up with 'judges' .
I'm not saying there shouldn't be a possible minimum standard, but it shouldn't be excluding, anyone should be able to submit ideas if Steve's idea were to be implemented.
Scalability
I think that would work if we just want a small, limited amount of products - my idea was to be able to cope with potentially thousands of designs and how to compensate those designs which people like and thus pay money for, as opposed to paying for a design which people may or may not like upfront. And I wasn't restricting it to DrupalCon tickets, perhaps other companies could offer incentives too. Or cold hard cash - percentage of sales or particular levels (e.g. £100 for every £1,000 of profit made per design).
Just throwing out some ideas...
It does unfortunately always
It does unfortunately always boil down to just that in design: 'people may or may not like'
Potential issue with large e-commerce marketplace is that it is another infrastructure that the DA will need to fund and support :(
A couple of concerns about this approach
Okay, as I understand your proposal, the Association would commit to sell any design that anyone submitted for the store. If so, one major concern would be that the store would get flooded with dozens (or even hundreds) of low-quality, low-selling designs, causing major logistical headaches for Association staff in charge of fulfillment and undermining the integrity of the Drupal brand.
My understanding is that the current Association store fulfillment process does not allow us to do print-on-demand, which means the store would need to keep in stock some quantity of every design, even if they only sold one or two copies.
My biggest concern though, goes to the point Morten made in his post:
If we include anything anyone submits, then we have no way of preventing the store from getting filled with a lot of low-quality merchandise. Anyone looking for a chance at a free DrupalCon ticket could whip something up in MS Paint and submit it as a design because there's little risk and high potential reward.
Apparel sold through the official Drupal Association store is not just a revenue-generation tool, it's also marketing and branding for the Drupal project. Having a store that's filled with low-quality products reflects poorly on the quality and professionalism of the Drupal project and community.
As the Drupal project grows in size and popularity around the world, we need to make sure that our marketing and branding is as high quality as possible.
Products on demand & Quality
There's plenty of companies out there who do fulfilment on demand, a partnership with one of those could sort out this. I bought a "That's no moon" t-shirt from Drupleh on zazzle (guess that one wouldn't get in the official store if being judged as promoting Drupal!) - there are plenty more Drupal products on there, of varying quality: http://www.zazzle.com/drupal+gifts
Obviously at the start the quality will be variable but this will soon change as people buy stuff so only the most popular stuff is highlighted.
I also disagree with your assumptions about quality - everyone is free to make their own version of Druplicon for their local clubs as they do and for merchandising material - I've seen plenty of what I would class as low-quality stuff available at DrupalCons from sponsors, I've also got some fantastic stuff, like the NodeOne Cookie Cutter!
Here's an example of stuff available only one click away from googling "drupal marketing material":
http://drupal.org/logo-special-events
Thanks Steve - I think
Thanks Steve -
I think there's a difference between stuff that's "official Drupal merchandise" and stuff that's produced by people in the community or companies for self-promotion.
We have an opportunity here to set the standard for what the Drupal brand represents and provide good examples for marketing material that can be utilized by others. Filling the official store full of crap no one wants to buy will undermine that and make it more difficult to promote what it is that makes the Drupal project and community so special and unique.
Who decides what's "official"?
It's a bit harsh to say the store will be "full of crap no one wants to buy" - I'm sure designers will be happy their contributions which they haven't even made yet are pre-judged so well.
There are many ways to ensure quality is shown - we have a great piece of software which can help us do this, with different areas for zero-sales products, top products, etc.
As for "official" products - who gets to decide? If it's the community then I don't see the difference between your concept and mine, except mine's scalable.
I really don't see why the "business" side of Drupal has to be much different than the software side - we don't ask people for "official" modules to be built, we let people build them and the most popular, useful, good ones rise to the top. That doesn't mean I don't utilise other modules in the long-tail which aren't as popular or "good".
It's about the brand
What we're talking about in the context of this thread are the items that are sold via the Drupal Association store on Drupal.org.
You favor an approach where anyone would be able to produce something that could be sold via the website, and market forces would ensure that highest quality products would "rise to the top", while I'm suggesting that we take a more strategic approach and think about the store as a marketing and branding opportunity to promote the Drupal project and community.
To me, it doesn't matter if other people want to sell other stuff on Zazzle or wherever; but I believe that the merchandise we sell on drupal.org should be material that reinforces our brand personality and values.
I think the comparison to code contributions is flawed, but think of it like the difference between core and contrib. Anyone can create a contrib module: some of are great, and some are terrible. Any code that's contributed to core, however, goes through a more extensive vetting process to ensure that it meets established coding standards, security review, etc. We don't just put the most downloaded modules in core and call it a day.
As Morten points out, doing merchandising is hard work that requires a lot of attention. Getting the community involved will help make that job easier, but it still needs to be taken seriously.
The Drupal project and community has a really compelling story to tell; let's not clutter it up with careless merchandising.
Differing approaches
I think there's room for both approaches - what I wouldn't like to see is just a few people deciding what is and isn't "quality" merchandise. It isn't an easy approach, but we do the same for code, and the code is our product, and that's quality. We could have an "application process" like the module application process for example. We could employ the methods you describe with core vs contrib, just with design instead of code.
If we pay a few people to create some designs I'm sure that'll be fine and great, I just think we have an opportunity here to do something more in line with how the community has grown so far and get a lot more designers participating in the community.
Goddammit george this is the
Goddammit george this is the 2nd time in a week were agreeing on something ;)
But i can only back this up. Any kind of official merch. Must be of an quality that you, you girlfriend/boyfriend also wanna wear. Actually even people that are not Drupal geeks (not even geeks!) they also wanna wear it, that should be the standard imho.
Stuff like the cookie cutter, is awesome but really demands a set of stones + a small that just wanna do that kinda stuff (as the nodeone ppl) and have the $ to back it up as a promotional item.
Doing Merch. is hard & demands as much attention as doing a website.
I have done it for fun a couple of years and belive me it takes a shit ton of time + even more time to get it done right. I have
Hoping that good stuff come by magic is both naive & extemely dangerous for the brand Drupal. We need to take this very serious unless we wanna turn it into a 2nd division football clubs crap with a logo smacked on top of it.
To define crap: If you better half think it looks like crap.
/morten.dk king of rock
morten.dk | geek Royale
doing merch
Exactly, so why stop people who freely submit modules freely submit merch?
I'm not saying we shouldn't do both - we can pump money into /some/ designs for the top events, but at least by having a "community store" we would also have a good idea of which designers we'd like to ask to make merch.
I just think if we restrict the DA store to a few, limited products, we will be missing out on a lot, and kinda flying in the face of the code side of the community by locking out those designers who want to see their own stuff out there but without the hassle and with a ready-made market. Any extra revenues from community-designed merch help, otherwise people like Zazzle will just get all the cash.
In terms of effort - it could be as simple as linking to our own store within one of these other third parties - not ideal but at least we will capture what is missed when, for example, I bought my Drupleh t-shirt from Zazzle.
CafePress
There's already a place for people to make random Drupal-inspired designs to throw on a T-shirt or mug. It's called CafePress. Or Zazzle if you prefer that route. Same deal. That market is already served. The only serious limit is the Drupal wordmark, which is very much explicitly by design.
The DA should not be in the business of supporting random crazy Drupal-inspired merchandise. George is very right in this regard: The Official Drupal Store(tm) should be limited to Official Drupal Merchandise(tm). That's the unserved niche. Curated and managed branding is an important part of properly marketing Drupal, which is part of the DA's mission.
As for the details of how the DA compensates designers for designs, as long as it's respectful of their time and effort I don't much care about the details or how much/if they're paid in currency.
Side note: Dear god the new g.d.o theme SUCKS for threaded discussion. It's utterly impossible to follow more than 2-deep replies. Ugh.
As much as I see where Syeve
As much as I see where Syeve is coming from, Design is very much down to personal taste and emotional attachment.
Having a brief allows you to fulfil requirements and support your decisions, but at the end of the day 'everyone is a designer' is very much true. Unlike development where clients, project owners etc won't look at your code and question is aesthetics, but will be only interested in wether it meets the requirements and business objectives.
Asking a designer to produce some cool Drupal swag that represents Drupal is not as quantifiable in its results as a brief that requests a design that maybe, educates, entices and creates interest in Drupal for people who do not know what it is. Then it becomes more of a marketing tool.
Don't get me wrong, I do like Steve's idea, and yes, a voting/most popular system would encourage the best to be more visible. But at what stage do you make it public? When there's only 5 submissions, which are, unfortunately, of poor quality? Have community only voting, so you need to be logged-in?
This still has the issue of judges, even if in this case it is the community as a whole. Although it isn't, the community as a whole has the potential of being a judge, but isn't by default, if they don't themselves trawl through submissions and vote on what is, at the end of the day, personal taste.
no voting
Just to clarify - I wasn't saying voting should happen, just the more popular ones in terms of sales should rise to the top.
The DA isnt allowed to pay a
The DA isnt allowed to pay a cut out of any sales cause of its non profit status.
Drupalcons and the bookstore etc is another matter afaik -im not totally sure about the law stuff but thats pretty much what i know.
The dream of the army of designs that suddenly runs toward the geek project drupal to "become famous" - getting freebees etc, is never gonna happen. sorry but thats just how it is :(
There still seem to be that dream from the larger community, but lets face it drupal is a kick ass geek tool, Its not a Designers best friend when he/she have to build a website
/morten.dk king of rock
morten.dk | geek Royale
non-profit rules
Yeah I'm not up to speed with what the DA can and can't do in terms of stuff, hence why I suggested things like DrupalCon tickets.
I disagree there's not design talent out there in the Drupal community - lots of Drupal companies have designers too. I'm not thinking of the lines of anyone wanting to "become famous" by doing these, just trying to work out a model which works well and reflects how we work as a community too, and enable many products.
I also think there's a lot of difference you get from something which has been designed with just cash in mind as part of a job and something which is created because of your passion for a product - my wardrobe is full of your T-shirts for example, cos they rock!
Again, just throwing out ideas - looking at the figures we make very little from merchandise and it's not on the list of priorities for revenue generation (see docs on https://association.drupal.org/about/governance/meeting-minutes) but seems like a no-brainer to me to get much more material out there, but I think that's going to be hard if we just hire people to make a couple of t-shirts and a mug, hence why I'm trying to come up with ideas.
Collected ideas for store items
I recently asked via @DrupalAssoc twitter (and a link at the bottom of the DA store): What swag should be in the store?
I collected responses here
If you have any ideas to add to the sheet, or good resources for items please put them in. This doc is just a starting point and I'm not sure of the cost and feasibility of any of the items.
It really comes down to cost and quality. I agree that quality is important and since any item would have to be pre-printed and paid for in advance, there is a financial risk involved.
Quality & financial risk
IF the current model is used then yes, stuff has to be printed up and paid for in advance - my idea wouldn't work that way.
It wouldn't make as much profit as printing yourself (which we could still do for DrupalCons etc. for most popular ones) but you'd be able to sell more, and you wouldn't be left with any stock to manage, and the whole process would be a lot easier. As said, there's plenty of Drupal products on Zazzle - if the DA don't do something similar then the business will go elsewhere to places which can do this. I'd love somewhere I could put my Drupal Brighton designs up on, but I'm not going to pre-print any.
Here at Google, we don't pay
Here at Google, we don't pay attn to designers too much :/