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Some of you might have received this greeting card these days. The visual is nice, but there’s much more behind it: the card results from a creative contest. In other words: I used the internet to ask people to design me a greeting card, it’s called “crowdsourcing”. There are a lot of websites for this: 99designs (Australia), Creads (France), Crowdspring (USA), 12designer (Germany), JadeMagnet (India)…  A lot of them have communities of designers, both amateurs and professionals, located in the whole world. Actually, one of these websites, the Chinese Zhubajie, could be considered as the largest employer in the world, with more people than the Peoples’ Liberation Army of China or Walmart-Stores in the USA!

Such creative contests are increasingly used by companies to outsource creative work, to look for innovative ideas, to seek inspiration… It’s a fascinating research topic that I would like to explore, and that’s why I started my PhD-work about creative “crowdsourcing” this year. So, what is “crowdsourcing”?

Crowdsourcing is the act of […] taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call (Howe, 2006)

I chose JadeMagnet because, beside the fact that I have been in contact with one of its founders, Manik Hindra, it was cheaper than the other platforms. So I posted a message on JadeMagnet.com (see my creative brief here) and waited a couple of weeks to see peoples’ designs.

Here’s what they came up with:

It’s very moving to see people create for you, especially when they come from remote places. I think that some of the designs where too christmas-y, others too neutral… but I still liked some designs. So I asked Aditya (the person from JadeMagnet who handled my requests) to ask the designers to redesign some of the cards according to this blog’s colors. Finally, I chose the one on the right.

It’s probably not a design that I would have bought in a store on on the internet. I found great inspiration on the web: sweet paper model cards, cards with optical illusions, cards with grid games or foldable, pop-up cards. But this card tells a story, and it has been designed just for you (you, who received it)! and you even have greetings from the designer, Jagroop Singh from Chandigarh, in India.

Read the text on the following image:

HAPPY NEW YEAR !