Quick. Without looking: what does the bird look like on the Twitter homepage?

(No, we haven’t been through this before.)

Okay…so you’re picturing the bird on Twitter’s homepage in your head. Does it look like either of these birds?

If you answered “yes,” you’re incorrect. Go check out twitter.com and take a look. I’ll wait.

…

I bring it up because the bird that actually holds court on twitter.com is the subject of this interesting article on crowdsourcing from Wired.com. Crowdsourcing as it relates to Graphic Design is the process of farming out design work to potentially hundreds of designers then giving the client the option of paying for the design they like best. If you “win” you get paid. If you don’t get selected you get bupkis. As you can probably predict, crowdsourcing is extremely popular in the Graphic Design community. The only problem with the Wired story about crowdsourcing is that the bird graphic on the homepage of Twitter.com isn’t an example of crowdsourcing.

The bird you see on the homepage (and to be fair, this is clearly discussed in the article), is from iStockphoto.com. iStock is a place for average, everyday designers and photographers to post whatever stock imagery and illustrations that they want in the hopes that someone will buy them for royalty free use. Submitting imagery to the site is entirely voluntary and the barrier to entry is low, meaning that the market is crowded and the competition is fierce.

Frankly: “Tough shit.”

If your work is valuable it will rise to the top, just like it does in any true market. If you suck, you suck. No one will buy your stuff and you’ll limp home battered and tear-stained. iStock is insanely competitive and insanely cheap compared to Corbis.com and other stock photography licensing sites in the market, but what it clearly is not is crowdsourcing.

If iStock functioned like a crowdsourcing service it would have users describe the photograph or illustration that they have in mind and indicate the price that they are willing to pay for it. Then, budding young photographers looking for some side money or for their big break, (and, presumably, lacking the foresight to realize that they are shortchanging themselves), will go out and try to take that specific shot. The site user would then select the shot that they want and pay only that photographer/illustrator the agreed upon fee.

Twitter did not contact iStock photo and say “we need a picture of a white bird on a brown branch with curliques at the end, we’re willing to pay $6. Go!” What they did was visit a royalty free stock imagery site and purchase the rights to use one of the files completely in accordance with the terms of use and the expectations of the original designer.

There are, literally, hundreds of thousands of websites out there that use imagery found at iStock because it is a cheap, easy and convenient alternative to premium sites that charge hundreds of dollars and put all sorts of restrictions on the use of their imagery. If you spend any notable time perusing the iStock catalog you start to see their images flash up all over the internet. That’s actually the market limitation on iStock: you can get a great image there super cheap, but you can’t restrict its use unless you pay a fair price to do so, meaning you always run the risk of seeing “your” image used elsewhere, but i digress…

In conclusion (somewhere, my high school english teacher just experienced an involuntary eye twitch), the crowdsourcing debate will continue to rage, but this is not a good field on which to have the battle. Twitter licensed a stock image. That’s it.

-oAk-

Nicole Kenney, my Notre Dame classmate and generally fascinating person who you might remember from this earlier post here at ATCO, recently had her insanely cool cartoon (pictured above) mentioned in this video about the Next Door Neighbors storytelling project at Smith Magazine. (And that is potentially the longest, most tortured sentence I’ve ever produced here at ATCO).

Check her out:

Video at Babelgum featuring Nicole’s work.

Nicole’s site.

Remember Survivor? (The reality show, not the lame song that former high school football players get misty-eyed about because of its association with Rocky).

When Survivor first aired, I remember thinking “they’re doing all of this for a million bucks? That’s not that much money…” We throw the term “million” around a lot in casual conversation, and it’s sort of minimized as a concept when words that sound the same but begin with “B” and “T” are also common. It makes “a million” seem like a small, approachable number.

It’s not.

I had this hit home for me last week when my account at last.fm went over 35,000 scrobbles for the first time. That’s pretty cool until you consider that I listen to music for hours at a time on a daily basis, and I’ve been scrobbling since December of 2005. 35,000 tracks in a little over 3 years?

A little math:

35,000 tracks in roughly three years is about 11,500 tracks a year (give or take. It’s actually 11,666.6666666 ad infinitum, but I rounded down). In other words, in order to reach 1,000,000 scrobbled tracks I would have to listen to music at the same pace for just under eighty seven years (!).

I didn’t actually believe that so I did the math again: 1,000,000/11,500 = 86.96.

A million is a huge number, but it pales in comparison when you consider that to reach a billion scrobbles I would have to listen at the same 11,500 tracks-per-year pace for 87 thousand years.

I’m going to try to keep this in mind the next time I engage in a little casual hyperbole by telling people I’ve listened to Achtung Baby “a million times.”

Evernote Preferences Pane

I love this.

A lot of applications offer a menu bar setting (Growl, Twitterific and Skitch are some of the ones that live in my menubar). Turning these icons off and on is generally a Preferences setting within the application that says “show menubar icon” or something like that.

Evernote’s icon is an elephant head with a page curl at the corner. It looks like this:

I think it’s really cool that Evernote’s setting in Preferences is “Show Elephant in Menubar,” instead of the more standard “Show Icon…” It has more personality, for a start, but also “Elephant” is such a loaded symbolic form in most people’s brains that I would bet most people would skip the word “Icon” or “Logo” entirely and just refer to Evernote’s mark as “the Elephant.” Someone, somewhere put some thought into this, presumably to help make even the tiniest interactions in the application as user-friendly as possible. I’m impressed.

What is it?

From Evernote’s “What is Evernote” page:

Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible andsearchable at any time, from anywhere. Did we mention that it’s free?

Evernote has been around for awhile, but I just started using it as a place to collect my meeting notes, sketchbook ideas, and project files last week. I’ve been very impressed. You should try it out.

Praise the lord and sound the trumpets…I finally got around to googling one of my most consistent vexations in InDesign: the dreaded “WTF black box around the placed URL from the client’s Word document.” An Example:

Without having done any research, I assumed this was just an artifact of placed text and tried to ignore it to the extent I could ignore something so glaringly wrong. Turns out, this is an indication of hypertext as far as InDesign is concerned. To lose these boxes you need to use the “Hyperlinks” panel (Window>Interactive>Hyperlinks). Highlight the text with the box around it and drag the corresponding hyperlink item in the Hyperlinks Window to the trash. It’s easy as that.

This post answered this question for me. So J.J., whoever and wherever you are, a tip of that hat and a beer in your honor. Thanks.

-oAk-