Hasta La Ideas

DesignCrowd is the name of a graphic design crowdsourcing venture that bills themselves as “The world’s #1 custom design marketplace.” Businesses seeking designs for logos, websites, T-shirts, flyers, brochures or business cards submit design briefs, then the site’s 133,000-plus designers submit concepts; DC estimates that concepts start rolling in within hours of posting a brief, and that they will typically add up to over 100 submissions per project. Businesses can then request changes of their selectees, and eventually money changes hands. The cynical ID’ers among us can think of it like a version of Quirky where you don’t need to know anything about injection molding. In any case, here’s how it works:

To draw publicity, DesignCrowd recently held an informal, internal design competition asking its users to re-design iOS 7. The submissions are different enough that they’re bound to be divisive. But it makes me wonder if Apple would ever let iOS users choose their own icons, and if people would be willing to pay others for them, as with ringtones.

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