To be fair to designers, it's often pretty clear the stark difference in quality between a carefully designed logo/brand and a crowdsourced one. (Gap's new one is a great example).
I think music and journalists (designers being grouped with journalists) are vastly different situations because of copyright law, yes. The law allowed a huge industry to grow around information asymmetry, hype, and price inflation. Journalism and graphic design seek (and work) very hard to produce things of value far greater than bloggers/crowdsource usually aspire to.
That said, blogging/crowdsource have and will continue to put a great deal of pressure on those performing at the highest levels in those fields. It's simply my hope that the top performers there will justify themselves while producing perhaps a new era of relevant work. Increased competition doesn't always involve complete steamrolling, just evolution.
(In fact, one evolution I could see happening is a design firm outsourcing some percentage of their own mock work to crowdsource sites. Prototypes are about instantiating the field of possibilities so you can learn about them and talk about them. I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't hurt them too much to not personally generate each and every one. The real value thus becomes their professional finishing touches, the market research, etc.)
The "designer" gets a little bit of scratch and exposure they never would have gotten otherwise. The "client" gets a design that meets their budget, and which is likely to be much better than what a professional designer would do for the same price. Who's losing out here?
> and which is likely to be much better than what a professional designer would do for the same price
Why would you think a novice on the web with Photoshop will automatically do better than a professional with experience and who is looking beyond making a cool design?
Logos aren't just pieces of art — they also brand a company. Crowdsourcing will never match a professional brand designer.
And why would you think that a novice on the web with Photoshop _couldn't_ do better than a 'professional' with blah blah blah, especially when this new logo is amateur hour at best and utter crap at worst.
I sincerely hope that the entire Internet is being trolled by The Gap on this one, given that the alternative is entirely depressing.
Either that or this logo is legit, meant to last, will work on consumers, and in turn will reduce designer's hourly rates around the world. :)
You're committing a fallacy in assuming that they have no choice. Even if there are a million novices with Photoshop and two professional designers, they'll still get a better deal than having chosen one professional designer. They'll pay the same money and get two professional designs they can choose from, instead of just one.
CP+B have done similar things, and tried to explore how crowdsourcing can create buzz (e.g. with Brammo) .. I think at one stage they even decided to ebay the services of their designers to create a sense of the agency's openness to 'new'.
It does seem that aesthetics aren't the main driver behind branding decisions any more. It's impossible to stand out by having the nicest looking identity.
Taking an approach like this makes sense on lots of levels, especially when marketing budgets have been reduced; create a couple of reasonably strong memes, which last long enough to seep into the public consciousness before they die .. and gain phenomenal exposure without spending too much. Gap get to create the hallowed 'relationship' with the customer by involving them their own brand 'journey'.
I did make myself slightly sick after reading back over that last sentence, but to an extent I think it's true. We all build up relationships with brands over time, and the course these relationships take can be manipulated.