Hi David...I've thought about it, and Twitter was too short to list the reasons why I don't like this idea.

1) As a professional web designer/developer, the potential payout for this is still well below what I would charge to design a custom template for a client.
2) It will be tough to get professional designers to participate. (See #1)
3) It seems their entire business model hinges on having the community design templates for them. Without professional designers (see #1 and #2) involved, I'm guessing the quality of the designs will be marginal at best, which makes the club less appealing for customers.

Last point... What kind of sucker would put in the kind of time and effort it takes to design a high-quality template with such a small potential payout and no guarantee of any payout at all?

I'll be interesting to see if this model works for them. I will not be participating, but I'll be sure and watch to see how it all plays out.

Maybe it's just that I'm approaching this from a designer/developer perspective. There may be budding designers willing to take part in this. Best of luck to them.

Hi Cory,

Thank you for your comments.

While I understand your point of view as a professional designer, I don't think it's very constructive to call anyone who doesn't subscribe to them a "sucker".

Also, let me just clarify that the CrowdSourced Designs concept is not the entirety of our business model, merely a bonus to our members... who will get the CrowdSourced template *in addition* to their monthly template.

......................................
An alternative view for the no-spec lobby:

For any one client, I can do between one and 6 different designs. All but one get rejected and end up gathering dust on my HDD. Submitting these designs to the competition is anything *but* spec work. If you don't win, you haven't lost anything, and if you do... well there's now some loose change in your pocket, a lifetime membership at NinjaTheme and NinjaForge, expert SEO advice on tap at Alledia, and professional Joomla training at www.joomlatraining.com

Hi Mark,

Yes, "sucker" was probably a bad choice of words. That was from the perspective of someone who makes a living designing and building websites, so I couldn't see myself ever taking part in something like this.

I'm glad to know there's more to the club than the CrowdSourced templates. That didn't seem like much of an incentive to join, IMHO.

I'm still not a fan of the idea, but best of luck to you.

Hi Cory,

Your concerns are definitely warranted, and we thought about them ourselves. There is also the whole No Spec movement to consider.

Ideally we would like to offer a higher payout, and will be in the future, but we can only afford so much from the beginning.

Designs can be retooled and re-entered in later contests, so there is no need to waste a design because you didn't win once.

The main benefit for this is that the number 1 complaint I have seen in other template clubs is the lack of variety in the designs. You can often tell that a series of templates had the same designer, even though the designer thinks they are quite different. But by opening it up to a competition, we are hoping to get a wider variety of input and produce a wider variety of designs.

People constantly complain that want some fresh designs, well here is their chance to put their money (or their time rather) where their mouth is. :-)

We can easily enough design them ourselves, and every month there will be 1-3 designs from our team in the mix anyway (we like designing), so this is more to give people a chance to have some influence over the templates they get, rather than just being at the mercy of the clubs designer, so to speak.

If you are doing it purely for profit, then yup it is probably not a good idea, and I suggest you stay away. But if you are a designer and always wanted X design made into a template, or would like the 5 minutes of fame of having your design on a few hundred or thousand sites (not bad on the resume I guess) and score a few perks while you are at it, then this might be suited for you.

There is also the possibility of picking up extra work from us, or from club members so the longer term perks could balance out.

Perhaps it will fail, but we are working to make it succeed and hope to see a template club that quite literally listens to their members, as they vote in the designs. If it fails, then at least we know for sure that this won't work. If we don't try then we will never know.

Thanks again for the feedback Cory. I hope you will stop by at least to vote for a design.

Thanks,
Daniel.

Hi Daniel... I'll definitely stop by. I'm interested to see the type of quality you get from your submissions.

What a grate idea ! Love seeing things like this.

There's so many people out there that're like photoshop pros and pull off some grate work for template designs, but often lack a coder or just don't know where to start.

Oh and btw Cory it's strange that you'd pull out of some thing like this. If you're the pro that you say you are this should be really easy should it not ?