A Preview Of The Design Challenges We’d Love To Host For You
We’ve run a few design challenges in our time. They’ve been fun for all. Lucrative for some. But they were lacking something. We think we’ve built a better mousetrap.
What We Want To Do
Run an ongoing series of design challenges.
Why We Want To Do It
To educate designers and engineers about how to create successful designs. While our website has tons of example designs, case studies and how-to info, merely reading our content is not as effective as actually creating a design and receiving feedback about it.
The Elephant In Da Room (Spec Work)
Being a bunch of creatives who serve other creatives (like you), we’re frustrated by the spec work thing, too.
So after consulting our customers, the No!Spec and AIGA websites, we’ve modeled our design challenges on how our friends at Instructables do it.
Here’s what we love about Instructables contests (and what we plan to do, too):
- Ownership: You don’t grant and they don’t claim any ownership rights to your content.
- Use Case: Your content is used for educational purposes only (there is no end client who will use your creative, period).
- Prizes: Winners get rewarded lots of prizes for their content.
We hope this approach resonates with you just as much as it does with us.
So What’s In It For Ponoko?
- More Revenues: If our design education via your interactive participation works, you will be more successful, and so will we.
- More Connections: We plan to reach out to brands to sponsor prizes and media partners to spread the word.
- More Content Diversity: While we have shared plenty of our design examples and are always creating more, designs created by a variety of people (including you?) will provide a more diverse picture of what’s possible and how to do it.
We’re hoping you’ll submit great content (you keep ALL IP, we display a screenshot of your design, tell your story and link to you, etc), we and our partners share it, lots of people learn and you get more people visiting you.
We are really excited for this and we hope you are, too. We want to make sure everyone is comfortable with all this before we kick off, so please chime in with any questions or comments you might have.
Thanks!
