Design competitions… the good, the bad, and the fugly.
Hello fine peops…
Sometimes in the sleepless parts of sleep, I find myself thinking about the design challenges we are offered as emerging artists and designers. I see Instagram is full of design prompts and challenges which are GREAT for unsticking the sticky blocks of creativity, and I have had whole pattern collections come out of them so YAY! But there is another type of prompt I am in two minds about.
The Design Competition.
These are instigated by companies looking for fresh content and product development. My mind often goes to the brainstorm room at the business HQ where someone says, “What about a design comp? We can ask artists to submit work and the winner gets to have their art high up in the listings, and it will raise their profile! Win win!”
Well, all artists and designers are offered the same opportunities, but I think it is more often those of us who are fledglings in a new career path and still establishing ourselves who answer the call. And not because we are less busy! Far from it…who has time to do FREE work? Us fledglings it would seem…
When I first started developing surface pattern collections for Spoonflower, I realised that the way to be even noticed by browsing buyers is to enter yourself into a design competition where the public vote and if you rank in the top 50 your design gets a free ride onto the top pages of the listings and you don’t have to pay for your design to be made available. Yes, it’s a pay-to-play platform at Spoonflower. In their own words,”Many of Spoonflower’s most successful independent artists got their start by participating in design challenges, honing their style, finding new techniques and cheering on others. Just like in yoga, the practice of doing the weekly challenge can be just as fulfilling as the end result!”
So, I did spend many many weekends on those design comps, and although I never made it to top 50 (there are thousands of entries for every competition!) a couple of my designs became much more popular because of their ‘ranking’.
But I found myself in COMPETITIVE mode. That’s not the energy I particularly want to be in. It has its benefits I suppose, on a career trajectory, but to my mind, energetically it is toxic. I want to be supportive and encouraging of other artists, celebrating their progress in the knowledge that there is room for us all, and we will all support eachother. It really comes down to a choice of your character, your values, how you want the world to be, and who you want to be in the world.
Then one day I stumbled upon the FLASH MARKETPLACE on Ohh Deer stationers, with the tagline “Upload and sell your work for a limited time. It’s basically a digital pop up shop!” I entered the fray. I have loved Ohh Deer for some time, and even though the whole marketplace is based on votes from the public in order to become one of their designers, it has its charms. I have a pop-up stationery store full of my cards and notebooks…until May 15, which is when it closes.
Yet again it has prompted me to create new designs and leverage designs I already had. And that little competitive voice that pops up from time to time, I hear you, but not today Satan!
Big love to you creative ones,
Tamsin x