Crowdsourcing versus Traditional Design

As part of the launch of OpenPress, the FHSST Grade 10 Mathematics book is getting printed. We felt that we needed a fresh set of covers for the books. They will be printed with a colour cover and we felt that the all the Maths covers should have a theme; similarly for the Physical Science books.

The covers will need to be available in the next 10 days or so and we were discussing the best way to get them done. The obvious way to go is to commission the work from a designer and go with that. We also considered the option of crowdsourcing the covers and have had a lot of debate about the merits of crowdsourcing.

To resolve the issue, once and for all (maybe), we’ve decided to run our own internal competition. The prize will be bragging rights as the optimal process for future covers for OpenPress / FHSST texts. We are going to allocate the same budget to the Maths and Physical Science covers, but we are going to have the Maths set commissioned by a regular design firm and we’ll get the Physical Science ones created on 99Designs.

Although it isn’t really a competition it will be fun to see the results. The only way to keep the results comparable is to give both processes the same:

• budget,
• brief,
• quantity and quality of feedback, and
• the same timeline.

I’ll post the brief a little later and the results as well so you can decide which you think is the best set and whether we’ve chosen the best process based on this little experiment. If nothing else this should be fun.