As multiple designers will attest, I am more than happy to pay for design work (nothing we have up publicly came from Themeforest or 99designs). But unless your concept absolutely depends on graphical experience --- and look how shitty Pitchfork's site was for years and years and years in the trendiest most superficial demographic imaginable --- graphic designers are a terrible thing to block your project on.
Rather than wrack my brain and carefully come up with a scoping document laying out all the pages and functionality in my next application --- a document that will be out of date exactly one customer meeting after I write it --- I'm just going to point my next designer at a $12 Themeforest theme and say "do this, but way better".
I don't mind that it costs $5-10,000 to get "better than Themeforest", but I do mind losing weeks of release time sweating whether it's time to pull the trigger on a designer and what exactly to have them do.
99designs is a different story. I don't have the designer's moral problem with spec!work but the misgivings people have about quality and IP infringements are based on real issues. I still think it's a good tool, but I can see why some would avoid it.
The designers' aversion to spec work seems more like an attempt at collective bargaining than a true moral stance to me. I'm not saying that collective bargaining is necessarily a bad thing, but the success of 99designs and the like makes me think that they won't succeed in this age of globalization.
Rather than wrack my brain and carefully come up with a scoping document laying out all the pages and functionality in my next application --- a document that will be out of date exactly one customer meeting after I write it --- I'm just going to point my next designer at a $12 Themeforest theme and say "do this, but way better".
I don't mind that it costs $5-10,000 to get "better than Themeforest", but I do mind losing weeks of release time sweating whether it's time to pull the trigger on a designer and what exactly to have them do.
99designs is a different story. I don't have the designer's moral problem with spec!work but the misgivings people have about quality and IP infringements are based on real issues. I still think it's a good tool, but I can see why some would avoid it.
Avoiding Themeforest though seems crazy.