Open Path Blog

They aren’t always easy to find, but from time to time I do come across an image or two of mine in use. Today I discovered MSNBC using one of the election campaign badges in their politics section. Hopefully more of these will pop up as the big election draws near this fall. Other graphics from this collection have also been spotted on the NPR and ABC News websites.

 If you happen to find any images from my portfolio out roaming the wild terrain of the web, drop me a note about it. 

Browse any photography forum, news site, blog, or other website and you can easily find numerous bust articles about photographers being arrested, detained, harassed, or even attacked simply for taking photographs. In most cases, the offending parties are security guards, and sometimes police officers, acting under the false assumption that photography is somehow tied to terrorism and that taking and publishing photographs of buildings (which have been photographed sometimes thousands of times before without incident) will somehow aid terrorists. A recent post in the istockphoto forums outlines one such recent incident of harassment on a photographer, where a freelance artist lawfully photographing public areas using a tripod set up on public land was followed by security guards and ultimately visited at his home by FBI agents. In all published and known cases of photographers being questioned, harassed, detained, arrested, or otherwise bothered while lawfully photographing public places, terrorism was not determined to be the motivation of the artist.

Photography has also never been tied to aiding terrorists carry out any significant terrorist activity of the last decade. According to attorney Burt Krages, “If you look back on the terrorism incidents over the past 10 to 15 years, prohibiting or restricting photography would have stopped none of them.”As the political season ramps up and the conventions approach later this summer, I have to wonder how many photographers will be arrested or otherwise prevented from doing what they legally and lawfully have every right to do; capture the events of our world as they happen. How much worse will things get as we enter another high-profile political season?

Just think about how much worse off we’d be if photographers were not allowed to capture these events. How limited our view of the world around us would become, and what a truly sad state of affairs we would be in then. 

I received my first order of Moo Cards recently. Moo Cards are small business cards, and can be ordered in sets of 100 using any number of images as artwork on one side of the card. I just used some of my stock backgrounds and the Open Path Design logo, in a few different colors. Overall the cards are pretty nice. Close-up, the print quality is slightly pixellated, but the paper stock is pretty slick. Full-size cards on the same stock would be perfect, and I’ve heard that Moo is in the process of adding full-size cards to their product lineup. 

Just when you think that this site is settled into a design and probably won’t change layouts any time soon, it does. Again. If you haven’t already noticed, Open Path is now sporting a new design, as well as a store. Yes, for the first time ever, you can purchase Open Path goods straight from the source. As the store build continues, new items will be added. Some will be modestly priced, some free. But all will be a bargain, and this will also allow for the bundling of items to offer special discounts and package pricing. Stop by the store and have a look around.  

It seems that no matter how hard I try, achieving that perfect balance between work, freelancing, writing, and creating new graphics and illustrations for the stock distributors is always leaning one way or another. In the past couple of weeks, the scales have definitely tipped towards new stock graphics, and I have been cranking out new stuff at an all-time personal-best record pace. The downside to this is that the writing has taken a back seat to the graphics work, so the crowdsourcing article is slightly delayed. And as it turns out, I have been rethinking the angle of that article, so it may become more-than-slightly delayed very soon if I start re-working it. 

Check out Stockxpert to see some of my latest graphics and illustration work. Just use the dropdown sort menu in my Stockxpert gallery to display the images in a newest-first order. 

I just signed on with a new stock image distributor. UltraShock has been around for a while now, but just launched a beta of v.2 of the site that includes an interesting new stock visuals marketplace. Prices are in the microstock range for vectors ($1-$10) and overall the site is modern, interesting and unique compared to other microstock websites.The high-tech interface includes a pretty simple upload system. The drag-and-drop uploader gives you a thumbnail preview of what you have on deck for upload, and also provides a checklist of associated files that need to be added to the list. This prevents you from leaving out a required file format, thus reducing the chances of having to re-upload the image again.One downside to the ultra-modern and advanced site design and architecture, though, is sluggish performance. On my Core2 Duo iMac, there are some loadtime and database connection issues. Everything works, but sometimes it takes a while to get where you are going. In the event that you run into any problems along the way, the UltraShock staff are extremely helpful. I had a small problem getting my login to work initially, and I received email support directly from the UltraShock CEO.My gallery at UltraShock is small so far, but you can check out what I currently have up on the site here.

I swear there will be some positive posts in this blog. It has just been hard to keep up with the flood of emerging new spec work websites.

First SitePoint spawned 99designs, then Pixisharrived on the scene, and now CrowdSpring is looking to make a name for themselves in the design contest marketplace. They are even holding a contest to design their upcoming website. Sort of an, “I’m not just the hair club president…” sort of vibe, I suppose.

I won’t bore you with the “spec is evil” speech. If you need some background on what spec work is, why it is damaging to any industry, and how it can backfire, just check out my previous posts and articles.

CrowdSpring is the latest in a recent outpouring of design contest websites that ask contributors to create professional-quality designs for less-than-professional wages. Really, no wages in many cases. What is most disturbing about CrowdSpring is that they are basically doing the same thing that the other crowdsourcing contest sites do, but they are also masking it with an additional layer of deceit. CrowdSpring has created an illusion of security that really leaves the same old holes in design contests wide open.

For example, CrowdSpring utilizes an Escrow services so that they can assure contest participants that money will be paid out to the winner. Aside from the obvious problem that this is still a contest and 99% of the participants will be working for free, CrowdSpring was nice enough to include this little gem of a loophole for contest holders:

“When you start your project, you’ll deposit the funds with us and we won’t release them until you tell us that you’re totally happy with the final product. Plus, we also offer an unconditional money back guarantee. If you’re not completely happy, then we’ll refund your money. Period.”

So there’s an Escrow system in place to guarantee payment, but oh, wait, all the contest holder needs to do to get their money back is say that they weren’t satisfied with the entries. Fantastic.

Also included in the CrowdSpring service is a royalty-free license for them to use your work in pretty much any way they please, forever:

“When you submit content to the Site, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display and perform the content in connection with the Site, in any media known now or in the future.”

So if it wasn’t bad enough that you are creating work that you probably will never get paid for, CrowdSpring grants themselves a license to use that same work for their own promotion and profit.

I don’t need to spell it all out here. This stuff is bad. Do your part and avoid these sites like the plague. If you are ever asked to work on spec, explain why you cannot do so and it is an industry standard to decline spec projects. There may be no stopping spec work at this point, but there is no need to accelerate the spread by tolerating it.  

The 2nd part of the crowdsourcing article is in the works. Here is an excerpt:

“The flaw of the current definition of crowdsourcing is that it makes no distinction between positive and negative outcomes in crowd work. The broad term “crowdsourcing” masks some of the underlying intent and purpose of individual crowdsourcing efforts. It can be used to veil the speculative nature of design contests just as easily as it can vilify microstock photography, a business that is usually not considered speculative and yields fair pay for many microstock artists. These two examples are polar opposites on the scales of ethical business practices and noble intent, yet they are both lumped into the crowdsourcing genre and treated as equals, each taking on some of the positive and negative connotations of the other.”

More to come soon, and the finished article should be available next week.

After much deliberation and revision, the final Open Path logo has been selected. This logo will be used both with and without the separate open “o” symbol, and the symbol itself will be used for icons, avatars, etc. 

The name and logo have a few meanings, both literally and figuratively speaking. The symbol depicts an “open path”, where path itself can mean several things (walking path, direction, illustrated line path, etc). The name evokes a variety of responses, from open possibilities to deeper levels of thought.

Quite honestly, however you interpret the name and logo is fine with me. I am just happy to finally have a site name and logo that actually mean something. Unlike my previous portfolio site.

Good to see some visitors to openpathdesign.com. I spent a few nights each week over the last several weeks putting the site together and getting the content organized. Unfortunately in typical ‘me’ fashion, once things start to go online, I start to rethink various aspects of the site design, structure, etc.

So expect to see some changes rolled out (quite slowly) in the coming weeks. Nothing is safe, and even the logo is getting tweakd a bit.