You're making the same argument that a well-rounded executive would make, as I said in my post. It's what the free market bears. You certainly have the right to use 99designs, and I'm happy you're satisfied using it.

Since you've created this developer vs. executive dichotomy, I should point out that I am most certainly a developer, and only an executive in the sense that anyone can print out business cards. I do not care about maintaining high wages for designers, just like they don't care about maintaining high developer wages. Everyone wants to pay less for goods and services, and demonizing people for that when none of the moral lines I mentioned have been crossed doesn't make sense to me.

I see. I can understand—I have many clients, and I wear equally many hats. Executive was probably a wrong choice, project manager would be a better one. When I assume the project manager role, I also face the same problem. I could use this glorious source of extremely cheap labor when there is a need for low-to-mediocre quality of design work (think mockups, non-approved explorations), and by all means, I should. The fact that I don’t is completely a result of my personal and naïve beliefs, and I have no illusion that avoiding this makes me a better project manager—on the contrary, someone that could just do that would be a better PM than I am. Because a project manager, or an executive should not be taxed with morality, only legality: it’s societies’ and nations’ job to ensure the moral matches the legal. This is arguably the reason why there is such a thing called minimum wage. We could remove it, and there are certainly jobs that would offer lower-than-minimum wage as there are people that will gladly take them. Why do we inject inefficiencies into the system, then? That’s the underlying, open-ended question below spec-work, and while I have some theories, I am utterly unqualified to answer that.

Can you define the moral line that using 99designs crosses? I think it's a perfectly moral agreement between designers, those seeking designs and 99designs itself. If it is immoral to ask someone to produce work with the understanding that they won't get paid if I don't choose it, then we have profoundly different understandings of morality.

99designs most certainly lowers designer wages. That is not an immoral act.

Lowering designer's wages is not an immoral act, of course. Still I would rather say it lowers low-end designers' wages, rather than all.

However, is it immoral to ask someone to work for below minimum wage? I believe so. Apparently the western society agrees, consequently we have laws to protect that. I'd say we do most definitely have two profoundly different concepts of what is moral and what is not.

You were just talking about the distinction between morality and legality, then you justified your position on morals with laws.

I do not believe that it is immoral to offer less than minimum wage for a job. I do not believe that any consensual arrangement between clear-thinking adults is immoral.

Isn't the issue that the designer can choose to work for less than minimal wage or not work. That's a very limited sense of consensual labour.

The exploitation of the global market is available to the commissioner (stackoverflow) in a way that is not available to the designer.

Whilst SO are enjoying a position of wealth wrought in part from the [owners] geographical location they are, here, using the lack of mobility of designers to get a relatively low cost design created. Moreover they are exploiting those who, on the whole, don't have the benefit of their wealth in order to maintain a low cost and at the same time creating a vast inefficiency in the labour performed to produce the design.

So the immorality IMO comes in via exploitation of the low paid, deflation of market price below local [labour] costs (as they are benefiting disproportionately from those high local costs), and purposefully introducing inefficiencies in to production.

You may not find those condition immoral - after all population control by virtue of below-subsistence wage levels is a natural part of a free market; some people seem to find that satisfactory.

If that's what you call immoral, do you only buy goods and services produced by workers making American/Western European-level wages? In the unlikely event that you do, isn't it morally suspect to deny workers in developing countries jobs just to maintain wages?

I'm inclined to think a lot of people who use 99Designs and other such sites do in fact consider and empathize with the designers on the other end, as do you. As you have rightly stated, there is no deception or forced participation. It's a free market.

What I don't think a lot of 99designs customers consider is their impact on the health of the design market. Allow me to illustrate this in the software development world:

...

Imagine you have a potential client that has put out an RFQ. You write up a proposal and submit it. You are not selected, but you learn that the potential client went instead with an offshore company that bid literally one third of your bid. There was no way you would have come close.

You may say "I build quality software. I charge what that's worth." The offshore competitor may write less efficient code that's much harder to maintain – but this client doesn't know, or care. They care that the software meets requirements and was delivered on-time and in-budget.

That's what designers who disagree with 99designs are concerned about – clients that don't understand what they're missing out on when they choose a one-off crowdsourcing instead of a collaborative, iterative process – and a market that comes to accept this as the norm.

Now maybe for a one-off side project, you simply don't need a full design process for a logo. Maybe a client that needs a quick prototype for an app doesn't need the quality codebase you can provide. I'm not against either of these scenarios. I just don't want to see the market for either industry lose track of the value its best talent can provide.

If a logo produced by a single employed designer or firm is better than a logo produced via a 99designs-style contest, then you're going to have to prove it instead of merely claiming that your way is superior. The Stack Overflow logo doesn't seem to be missing some sort of je ne sais quoi that a non-contest logo would have. I'm also happy with my 99designs logo. If I'm hurting my business with such a logo, I'd appreciate some sort of proof.

Otherwise, this seems to be an argument about maintaining designer wages, and I am rightfully not concerned. Everyone wants their wages to go up and the prices they pay to go down.

I'm not claiming your logo is objectively detrimental to your business, just as I wouldn't claim that off-shored software is objectively detrimental to an offshoring client. I've certainly used software developed by a small team in India that did exactly what it needed to.

I don't know what your logo looks like. It might be a great piece of design that connects with your customers and represents your business well. All I'm saying is that a proper design process helps ensure that happens; it's no different from software in that regard.

I see the problem that a site like 99 Designs creates for designers at large, but I don't see how that is everyone else's problem. It's your job (if you are one such designer) to communicate the superiority of your design process to potential customers and no one owes you a well-educated marketplace.

>> The offshore competitor may write less efficient code that's much harder to maintain – but this client doesn't know, or care. They care that the software meets requirements and was delivered on-time and in-budget.

Everything hinges on that "may", doesn't it? Either the code is worse, or it isn't. If so, the client will suffer for it, and smart companies will learn not to go with the lowest bidder. If not, congrats to the offshore company for outcompeting me.

I think I'm producing high-quality software, but ultimately, I have to prove that in the market. The market is healthy when everyone has maximum freedom about what to produce or provide.

I wouldn't engage in a bidding war to make software because I'm convinced that I don't have to do so in this market. If things change, maybe I'll become desperate enough to do that, or maybe I'll find another line of work. The invisible hand will keep allocating workers as needed.

> Allow me to illustrate this in the software development world

You don't need to image it, it already exists: www.freelancer.com, www.guru.com, www.project4hire.com, etc.

> I'm not against either of these scenarios.

Then that's really it, isn't it. 99designs and sites like it have perfectly reasonable use cases.

I agree. It's by choice that people participate in this type of website, with the knowledge that they may not be paid. No one is forcing designers to partake.