crowdSPRING

Carri got a note from @crowdSPRING in response to a posting on Twitter about needing a designer. She then forwarded the link to me -- www.crowdspring.com.

I took a peek at it, and posted to twitter that crowdSPRING wasn't going to do it for me as an employer. I was then pretty impressed that Angeline of crowdSPRING was trolling twitter well enough to not only find leads (Carri) but to see me talking about her company and followed up with me.

So I wrote her a nice email explaining what I didn't like about the service, which I'll elaborate on here.

The quick answer to what I didn't like is that 'the kind of project you want to start' didn't have my kind of project. If I want web, I'm going to need more than a pretty picture, I need HTML (and actually, in my case, I need a Flash person).

The cateogries are extremely limited to

Graphic design

• Logo
• Logo AND Stationery
• Stationery (letterhead, business card, envelope)
• Illustration
• Print design
• PowerPoint

Web design

• Website (uncoded)
• Icons and Buttons
• Ad banner

Photography

• Custom photography
• Photo retouching

I believe it's commodity service as opposed to, say, Guru.com which is for much more custom development. But because it's so limited I'm going to be much more likely to use other services and not revisit crowdSPRING.

But then, there are lots of people out there who just need a logo and your service will probably work great for them. The caveat I posted was 'as an employer' but for someone just starting their SoHo company, it's probably just fine.

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Angeline 2008-08-08 16:23 Hi Michael! I was going to reach out to your input via email, but as you've posted your thoughts in the Blog, I thought it'd be nice to comment here.

First off - I really hope they call you 'The Bissellator.' That's pretty amazing. My big bad wolf name at work is 'Angelineasaurus Rex.'

Okay, now that I've gotten that out of the way, here goes..

Thank you, thank you, thank you times a hundred for your input. Just so you (and the whole internet) know, we are an infant company. Our staff of 8 is very proud to have over 4,000+ creatives participating on our site's projects.

We call ourselves the creative marketplace because we have plans - big ones.

Eventually, we want crowdSPRING to be a place where you can get your entire web site (including Flash and coding), a commercial, music, basically anything creative. But - given our small staff, there are only so many hours in a day, and we want to work on making everything super stellar in the design area before branching out.

So, long story short - Thanks for mentioning us and checking us out! It's one more person that knows about us, and that makes me smile. Hopefully we'll be on our way to comprehensive creative service greatness.

Best of luck with your design search!